Łyskaŭ Castle

The castle sits on the right bank of the river Mukhi (also recorded as Shchyby), about half a kilometre from the nearby settlement. Its defended area followed a neat square plan measuring roughly sixty-eight metres on each side, and the fortifications were formed mainly of large earth embankments and surrounding ditches. To the east the position was guarded by marshy river banks, which helped shape the site’s defensive layout.

A substantial western rampart survives as the most substantial earthwork, measuring about ten metres across with a flat top roughly two metres wide that contains a central passage interpreted as the original entrance. Sections of the southern rampart remain, and fragments of the eastern embankment have been traced. Historical descriptions record round corner towers with a diameter near eight metres at each corner of the square; these round towers are part of the site’s recorded plan.

A moat runs around the castle’s immediate perimeter, and beyond it stood a second outer rampart that reached about one to one and a half metres in height and up to four metres in width; remains of this second bank are preserved on the west and south sides. At a greater distance, approximately ninety metres from the central enclosure, an additional arcuate rampart and moat enclosed the broader complex. One record indicates that this outer work surrounded the site on the north, west and south, while another places it on the west, south and east; inside that outer line there was a roadway and a raised platform identified as the base for a tower.

Excavations exposed a cultural deposit about forty centimetres thick containing fragments of glazed tile, pottery dated to the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, and pieces of grooved brick plastered with clay and lime, among other finds. These materials were recovered during nineteenth‑century and 1970s fieldwork and are kept at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of Belarus. The archaeological record preserves the earthworks, traces of moats and fragmentary structural elements, and the recovered artefacts provide direct evidence of the site’s domestic and defensive use across several centuries.