Day 9: Burgruine Rauhenstein

We walked to some ruins nearby this morning. What a beautiful old castle! The walk itself was very, very short, just a couple hundred feet, but steep. I was going to say "hike," but it was too short to be called a hike, so I'll stick with walk. The ruins aren't right outside of the apartment either, we had to drive about 10 minutes to the spot, but that was no trouble. There was another great playground at the parking lot too, so we got to play there for a while before and after the castle.

Here are some pictures!

What a neat place this was. The castle must have really been beautiful in its day. It's pretty much totally in ruins now, but you can see where they've patched it with concrete and stabilized it with cables and bars, so I don't think it's going to crumble and further any time soon.

It was really built up on the sheer side of the hill (I can't really call it a mountain!). It was built in the 12th century I think, and I just can't imagine how they pulled it off way back then. I get scared just looking at it!

These are the wooden stairs to the tower. I suppose the tall tower, which is on the left there in that top photo, was for keeping lookout and whatnot. Definitely not living quarters.

This photo was taken from the top of the tower, looking down the stairs to the bottom. Obviously these stairs were built fairly recently, but boy were they scary! All of the other flights hugged the walls, but for some insane reason, this last flight went right through the center, catwalk-style. SCARY!! I thought of you Aunt Marilyn! If you were there with us, I think I would have skipped it. But I didn't want to be the only one to miss out, so I pushed through. It was definitely at my limits though!

Here is looking down on the castle from the big tower.

The castle, or what's left of it, was mostly made of stone and I guess whatever they used for concrete back in the day. There was still a little bit of wood left, shockingly, where the beams that made up the floors entered the walls, and here and there at a window. There were also lots of old bricks in there, and some kind of concrete or plaster coating on some of the walls. It must have been 3 stories high, and you could still see some old fireplaces and poke your head up a chimney.

Here's a video we made on the inside.

Vanessa, here's a link to a German wikipedia article on the castle: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgruine_Rauhenstein.

According to Nick, this says that the castle was built by and primarily inhabited by robber-knights. It was sacked and rebuilt numerous times, abandoned eventually, and de-roofed when Austria initiated a roof tax in the 1700s, which taxed buildings according to the area of their roofs. Apparently this is why so many old castles don't have roofs on them. And here I thought they'd just collapsed! Efforts to restore it began in the 1800s, when Baden started to become popular with tourists.