Bertradaburg

Bertradaburg stands above the village of Mürlenbach in Germany and was established and used by the princely imperial abbey of Prüm. The castle first appears in records in the thirteenth century, described as a state fortress under the abbey’s authority. Local tradition connects the site with Bertrada, mother of Charlemagne, and has been taken to imply a birthdate for Charlemagne around 747, though this remains a traditional association rather than documentary proof. In the nineteenth century some writers proposed the hill as a Roman castrum guarding the road from Trier to Cologne; that identification lacks supporting evidence and the castle lies four to five kilometres from the Roman road.

During the upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Prüm Abbey was occupied and damaged by revolutionary French forces between 1794 and 1802; after secularisation the castle was seized and sold into private hands. Surviving walls and buildings underwent extensive restoration in the late twentieth century carried out by the Tiepelmann family, and the state funded reconstruction of the ruined double-tower gateway, whose restored portion rises to about thirty metres. In 2009 federal and state grants helped stabilise the sixteenth-century southwest roundel and renovate the thirteenth-century shield wall. The site remains privately owned, is opened for guided visits, hosts an annual Burgfest in its courtyard, and contains holiday apartments that are being renovated.