Upper Castle (Kuchenheim)
| Upper castle | ||
|---|---|---|
 Today's condition of the Upper Castle, with the museum guest house |
||
| Creation time : | First mentioned in 1259 | |
| Castle type : | Niederungsburg, moth | |
| Conservation status: | Remnants of the foundation, trench | |
| Construction: | Quarry stone | |
| Place: | Euskirchen - Kuchenheim | |
| Geographical location | 50 ° 38 '55.3 " N , 6 ° 49' 28.6" E | |
| Height: | 170 m above sea level NN | |
|
||
The Upper Castle in the Euskirchen district of Kuchenheim was a lower castle from the 14th century. The three-storey corner tower from the 15th century as well as wall foundations, a historical bridge foundation and the moat have been preserved from it.
Today, in the immediate vicinity of the remains of the castle, there is the “Mottenburg Museum Guest House ” of the LVR Industrial Museum Euskirchen - Müller Cloth Factory .
_003x.jpg)
history
On the grounds of the LVR industrial museum there are fragments of the "Upper Castle", which was mentioned in 1259 as "castrum Cugenheim". Archaeological excavation finds suggest that here earlier, namely in the 11th / 12th Century, a so-called moth existed: a tower hill castle, a defense tower made of wood on a heaped hill - surrounded by a moat .
In the Middle Ages, the castle , now built from rubble stones , with its border location near the Duchy of Jülich, had an important strategic importance. The castle complex originally consisted - like many water castles in the Rhineland from this time - of two parts separated by a moat. During an excavation by the Rheinisches Amt für Bodendenkmalpflege in 2004, several wall sections were uncovered that show the tower as part of a brick mansion. The suspected tower on the left side of the front could not be proven. In front of the front of the house there was a moat about nine meters wide and up to 2.40 meters deep, which was used as a "garbage pit" for a long time. Numerous finds were recovered from it: shards of tableware from the 14th to 18th centuries, animal bones, small bronze pieces, window glass, leather and shells from the Atlantic. The finds suggest a high standard of living in the small Rhenish aristocratic seat. A stone bridge led across the moat to the manor house, of which three pillars have been preserved. These are based on mighty oak timbers from a previous bridge. The oldest wood dates the bridge construction to 1442, two somewhat younger wood (felled around 1470) probably belong to a repair phase.
The castle was owned by Cologne fiefdom until 1755 and changed between different noble families; from 1755 ownership passed into bourgeois hands. Jacob Koenen bought the Upper Castle from the heirs of Fingerhuth in 1851 and set up his flourishing business - with more than 30 "spinners" and "weavers" - for the production of Koenentuchen in their extensive premises, which had previously been used for paper manufacture. Under the management of Carl Koenen , son of Jakob Koenen, the number of employees at the Jakob Koenen cloth factory rose to 330 by 1939 and later to 1,024 (1958). The textile crisis followed in the 1960s, which resulted in the cessation of production in the 1970s. In 1982 the Jakob Koenen cloth factory was finally closed. In 2001, the Rhineland Regional Council acquired the site in order to carry out extensive excavations and to build a museum guest house for the neighboring "Rheinische Industriemuseum" (today: LVR-Industriemuseum).
Excavation and current use
After the excavations in 2004 by the Rhenish Office for Land Monument Preservation, the Rhineland Regional Council secured the wall foundations in 2006, filled the moat again, restored the castle hill based on the typical shape of a moth and built a modern, narrow bridge over the historical bridge foundation. In this way, the castle complex, which had been largely destroyed, became legible again. The “Mottenburg Museum Guest
House ” was built in the immediate vicinity of the LVR industrial museum site, cloth factory Müller , which allows school classes to stay for several days with an educational program on all aspects of the museum. The bricks for the modern guest house come from the demolition of the ruinous building of the former Koenen cloth factory, which used to stand on this site.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Herzog, Harald: Castles and palaces. History and typology of the noble seats in the Euskirchen district. Rheinland-Verlag, Cologne 1989, here pp. 348–352.
- ↑ Relles, Corinna / Rünger, Gabriele / Tutlies, Petra / Zanger, Octavia: Upper Castle Kuchenheim. In: Friends and supporters of the Stadtmuseum eV / City of Euskirchen (ed.): The castles around Euskirchen. Euskirchen 2005, pp. 33-35.
