Burg Hausenbach

Burg Hausenbach occupies a granite spur above the settlement and is laid out as a two-part hill castle with a lower outer ward and a raised inner ward. The defensive ditch that once encircled the site has been filled in. The outer enclosure forms a rectangular, horseshoe-shaped courtyard whose open southern side faces the inner ward and is closed by a rubble-stone wall. Access to this lower court is through a projecting gate tower set in the middle of the northwest side.

The gate tower rises three storeys and shows cut corner stones at its angles. Its present hipped roof dates to the later seventeenth century. The carriage gateway beneath the tower has a rounded arch that marks where a drawbridge once stood and carries painted shields above the opening that commemorate the Jörger and Zinzendorf families. Immediately east of the tower an attached two-storey building also carries a hipped roof from the later 1600s, while a cluster of structures farther south along the outer court’s east side were erected in the twentieth century where formerly only a defensive wall stood.

On the outer ward’s west side a long two-storey range contains a structural core from the sixteenth century. The exterior shows strong buttressing and a decorative wave-band beneath the eaves, while the interior preserves cross-ribbed stone vaulting that dates to the same sixteenth-century phase of building activity.

The inner ward sits above the outer court to the south and is reached by a ramp that leads to a large double-leaf gate or to a smaller adjacent doorway set in the south wall; that smaller entrance replaces an earlier gatehouse. The principal buildings here are a robust two-storey residential hall and, at its southern end, a tall square defensive tower. Both elements date to the thirteenth century and belong to the Romanesque building phase of the site.

The tower comprises six storeys and is capped by a pyramidal roof with an angled break in the slope. The lowest two levels retain cross-ribbed vaulting, while some lower openings were later enlarged to admit light. The main hall developed from a thirteenth-century strong house and underwent remodeling around 1560, with further changes to its façades in the eighteenth century. The core medieval fabric survives, but the interior was largely cleared out when the building served as a granary. On the hall’s east face a carved stone shield shows the imperial eagle and the letter L, a reference to Emperor Leopold, and windows here sit in stone surrounds with late-Gothic sills; the roof on the north side is hipped. Northwest of the hall a small forecourt once formed a narrow killing zone; historical records describe it as such, though no structural fabric of that narrow forecourt survives today.