Bērzaune Castle

The castle occupied a defensible, water‑surrounded position on a hill: the Bersonite river lay to the west, a stream with sloping banks flowed to the north and east into the river, and a large pond lay to the south. A small settlement of four farms stood on the opposite bank and a bridge crossed the river to the castle. The internal courtyard formed a roughly square area measuring about 44 by 51 metres, reflecting a compact plan adapted to the surrounding water features.

A continuous curtain wall enclosed the site. Its lower courses were built of unworked fieldstones, and the wall reached a thickness of roughly 1.3 to 1.5 metres. Access to the enclosure ran through a gate tower on the west side. Surviving reports and measurements record these defensive works as robust, and they provided the framework for buildings pressed against the inner face of the wall.

A projecting round tower defended the south‑eastern corner and was later equipped for cannon. Its outside diameter measured about seven metres while the interior space was two to two and a half metres across. Toward the road the tower’s wall thickened to about 2.5 metres, and at the junctions with the curtain wall it measured roughly 1.9 metres. A 1522 inventory names a gate tower, a firearms chamber and a “new tower,” and it places a weapons and munitions store by that tower. The round tower is judged to date from the beginning of the sixteenth century, built to cover the main road and the approach to the gate.

Buildings stood against the inner face of the curtain wall on several sides of the courtyard: one block on the west wall north of the gate tower, a structure on the north side, and two ranges on the east flanking the entrance. A 1522 record identifies in these ranges a refectory with a kitchen, a chapel, private chambers, cellars, granaries and other storerooms, indicating that the complex combined domestic, storage and military functions. Swedish strengthening and later expansions in the seventeenth century altered the defensive layout before the castle fell into ruin.

The ruin has undergone substantial loss and reuse. After the wars many stones were removed for construction of manor outbuildings nearby. By the early nineteenth century fragments of the ring wall and the round tower remained standing. In 1944 the surviving ruin, including the nearly original‑height round tower, was destroyed in combat and the hill was cut by trenchworks. At present only small, overgrown fragments of masonry are visible across the mound, much of the former fabric lies under rubble, and the cellar space of the round tower has been exposed.