Alt-Wildon Castle, Wildon

The castle occupies a narrow spur at the western end of a roughly 300 by 80 metre plateau on the Wildoner Schlossberg, the spur dropping steeply to the north, south and west and joining the main plateau to the east. The original approach ran from the east along a path that follows an old neck ditch, and the spur itself terminates on a broader small platform that is supported below on the south and southwest by a retaining wall. On that small platform stand the ruined chapel and the fragments of the surrounding defensive circuit.

The defensive works once enclosed the plateau on the north, northwest and west with a stone ring wall. Surviving sections of the wall and its supporting ashlar retaining masonry show an embrasure-type narrow gun or arrow slit in the northern wall and the remains of a doorway in the western portion. Excavations to the west and north of the tower revealed masonry from the twelfth century, a water cistern, and the footings of a hall building that had been incorporated into the northern and eastern stretches of the enclosure wall.

Below the chapel the southern retaining wall is built of finely dressed small ashlar blocks and is consistent with twelfth-century masonry found nearby. The retaining work on the southwest is rounded in plan and uses larger ashlar stones; that sector appears to have been strengthened in the later twelfth or thirteenth century, probably by an added blind wall. The broader plateau end is held by a supporting wall on the south and southwest, and the chapel stood on the platform that this wall created.

The chapel itself survives as a freestanding ruin on the western plateau. It once had a barrel vault and Gothic-style buttresses. Inside a carved coat of arms bears the date 1520 and the name Ulrich von Leysser, recording an early-sixteenth-century connection. The structure is fragmentary but its vaulted form and masonry indicate an early-modern rebuilding or repair phase.

At the highest point of the spur the residential tower stands on bedrock. The tower has a square footprint and three preserved storeys, its walls built of irregular coursed rubble with small dressed blocks inserted and squared cornerstones. The tower’s door and window surrounds and its masonry place its construction around 1400. The ground floor contains a small earthen ramp; the first upper floor has a narrow slit-shaped opening on its south side; the second upper floor preserves a Gothic rectangular window on the north face and corbels interpreted as supports for a former balcony, while the east face retains a corbel fragment alongside another rectangular opening. The tower survives as a ruin but with these distinct architectural elements in situ.

A slightly northeast position on the plateau contains a flat, rectangular, wall-enclosed area whose original purpose is unclear; excavators have suggested it may have served as a tournament ground. Archaeological interventions between 1985 and 1994 conserved standing masonry, removed rubble, and cleared vegetation, leaving trenches visible for a time. Later conservation work in 2014 and 2015 stabilized the tower foundation and led to the infilling of some excavation cuts. Further trenches opened in 2015 and 2017 around the chapel and tower revealed additional masonry from several construction phases. The castle remains a ruin with multiple masonry fragments preserved and with evidence of both medieval building campaigns and more recent quarrying activity on the hill.