Homboll Castle Ruin

En un regard

Le château en bref

The Homboll, also known as the Homburg or "Altes Schloss", is a small volcanic tuff hill of nearly 678 m situated south-east of the Hohenstoffeln, about 1.5 km south-west of Weiterdingen, in the municipality of Hilzingen. Its summit, rising some twenty metres above the meadows, once bore a small fortified castle whose history remains poorly known: as early as 1931, a local author noted that its origin, its end and the family who lived there were known only from tradition and from old sketches of the ruins. More recent castle literature dates it to around 1400 and cites it for the first time in 1423; it is said to have been an imperial fief, held from 1415 by the younger branch of the lords of Stoffeln, then passed with their possessions to the Hornstein family after 1579, definitively in 1623. Its ruin is placed either in 1561 or during the Thirty Years' War, the sources differing. The base of a structure of about 5 × 7 m survives, interpreted as a keep, with walls up to 2.5 m thick, as well as traces of a rampart and a ditch encircling the summit except to the south. The hill, overgrown with trees and scrub, is also protected as a geotope.