Ruchomperk

Ruchomperk is a medieval castle site near the village of Černíkov in the Czech Republic, erected during the period of the Kingdom of Bohemia.

Archaeology shows the site was established at the turn of the 1200s, during the reign of King Ottokar I. The fortification appears to have been created either as a small royal support point within the kingdom’s territorial line of defenses or as the residence of the royal courtier Černín of Drslavice. Its position on a summit surrounded by uninhabited forest has been taken as an indication that the fortification served a territorial, rather than purely domestic, purpose and that Černín of Drslavice may have administered it on the king’s behalf.

Excavations indicate the place was occupied for only a short span, roughly fifty years, after its foundation. The site’s decline coincided with the exile of the knights called Czernin of Drslawitz, and it cannot be excluded that those knights may have taken control of the castle at some point before its abandonment. A single surviving written mention, dated 1404, links a Maruš Černík z Ruchomperka to the place. For many years that reference was interpreted to mean the castle survived into the fifteenth century and that Maruš Černík was its last castellan before the holding passed to the Puschberg lordship, but later work has found no connection between the family using the Czernin von Rauchenberg predicate and this fortress.

When the Puschberg estate returned from Ernst von Hirschstein to the Bohemian crown in 1457 only the surrounding woods and the mountain called Kouřím were listed, with no explicit mention of the castle. A 1462 transaction covering half of the Puschberg estate named the Kouřim forest together with the deserted castle Ruchomperk. In the nineteenth century an 1830 description recorded remaining fragments of masonry and a well, and local tradition at that time preserved a legend that an underground passage once ran from Ruchomperk to Pušperk. In 1927 archivist František Teplý equated a fortress called Čirnperk with Ruchomperk, a connection later shown to be incorrect.