Butter churn tower
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A butter churn tower is a two-part defense tower , in which the upper part of the tower has a smaller diameter than the lower tower. In this way, a recess is created halfway up, which was used as a circumferential walkway , while the slimmer attachment rising above it served as a raised lookout. The two parts of the tower were mostly cylindrical; butter churn towers with a square floor plan are rarer. The name is derived from the similarity with the shape of a butter churn , a cylindrical barrel with a narrow pusher.
The design came up in the 14th century, especially for mountain peace in castles , but was also used for city wall towers or guard towers . Its combat or defense value was only slightly higher than that of towers without a churn attachment, but at least it brought an improved and wider view. The main reason for building such butter churn towers was therefore probably less of a strategic and more of a symbolic nature.
In the late Middle Ages, a noticeable number of butter churn towers emerged in the Middle Rhine- South Hesse- Taunus area . Examples of butter churn towers can be found e.g. B. in Bad Homburg (White Tower) , Friedberg (Adolfsturm), Idstein ( Hexenturm , the keep of Idstein Castle ), in Oberwesel the Ochsenturm and on the Marksburg above Braubach am Rhein, whose square keep in 1468 has a small butter churn tower as an attachment which was removed after a fire in 1705 and renovated in 1905. One of the tallest towers at 56 meters with a variant of a butter churn tower is the round tower from 1453, the landmark of the city of Andernach . It has an octagonal tower tower with a gable stone helmet. The highest keep of a hilltop castle with a butter churn attachment (1370) was the keep of Rheinfels Castle above Sankt Goar am Rhein, destroyed in 1797, with a height of 54 meters at the intermediate platform. At 53 meters, the third highest preserved keep in Germany and on the Osterburg near Weida in Thuringia is built using the butter churn construction. With its 24-meter-high substructure from 1193 and the eight-sided pointed stone helmet from the 15th century, it is also one of the oldest preserved keeps.
Highest butter barrel keep at Rheinfels Castle, 1607
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literature
- Reinhard Friedrich: Butter churn. In: Horst Wolfgang Böhme , Reinhard Friedrich, Barbara Schock-Werner (Hrsg.): Dictionary of castles, palaces and fortresses . Reclam, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-15-010547-1 , pp. 103-105, doi: 10.11588 / arthistoricum.535 .
- Otto Piper : Castle studies. Reprint of the edition from 1912. Weltbild, Augsburg 1994, ISBN 3-89350-554-7 , p. 217 ( digitized version ).
