Altenklingen Castle

The site displays a long sequence of medieval and later construction, with the earlier defensive works on the southern spur and the later Burg Klingen and Schloss Altenklingen occupying the northern spur. The standing castle is a late-Renaissance ensemble, while archaeological investigation and building studies have revealed elements of the older fortifications and service structures beneath and around the present fabric.

Excavations in 1910 and 2014–15 uncovered the stone chapel with painted decoration interpreted as the sacral building of the early Altenburg phase, and a deep shaft well cut through the bedrock to about fifty metres. Archaeological evidence confirms the defensive system established from c.930, including an outer ditch, a formal gate complex and a circular wall with a battlemented walkway, and the later addition of a stone residential house and a masonry tower between about 950 and 1050; the tower was rebuilt in the eleventh century. Remains from these phases survive in fragmentary form and were identified during fieldwork.

Investigations of the standing Burg Klingen in 2021 identified masonry interpreted as the east wall of a remise and the west wall of a cellar at three points within the present castle, indicating that the medieval footprint largely underlies the later Schloss Altenklingen. The current complex comprises a north wing, the Great Castle, three storeys high with thirteen rooms, and a south wing, the Small Castle, set at right angles. The chapel is dedicated to Saint Wiborada. The principal approach crosses a bridge and enters through the gatehouse of the Small Castle into an inner courtyard; the main portal of the Great Castle is bordered by a Renaissance fresco and bears the combined coat of arms of the Zollikofer–Klingen alliance.

A surrounding enclosure with corner turrets once emphasised the site’s defensive character; that enclosing wall and its turrets were removed in the nineteenth century, though a surrounding moat is reported to have survived. A cistern nearly twenty metres deep, largely cut into the rock, was filled in during nineteenth-century works. Nineteenth-century alterations also changed much of the interior furnishing, but the internal arrangement preserves named rooms from different periods, including the Ahnensaal, the Schaffhauser Stube, the Reutterstube and the Kapellstube. The wooden construction model made by Mathäus Höbel for the sixteenth-century rebuilding remains as a documented object connected to the castle’s reconstruction.