Randeck Castle Site

Architecture, patrimoine et histoire · Allemagne entière

Right on the edge of the Albtrauf, the great escarpment of the Swabian Jura, the Randeck site occupies a rocky spur at nearly 790 metres, a little over a kilometre south of Hepsisau. Customarily associated with Ochsenwang, a village of Bissingen an der Teck, it actually lies within the territory of Neidlingen, in the district of Esslingen. The castle was built in the second half of the 13th century by Konrad von Neidlingen; his son Heinrich was the first to bear the name of Randeck, in 1292, which became that of a knightly line established here until the 15th century. Still depicted on a forest map of 1589, the building appears only as sections of wall around 1680. Today only the castle site remains: traces of the ditch, an almost obliterated neck ditch and the castle rock, from which the view plunges into the valley. The famous Randecker Maar, a former volcanic crater one kilometre to the west, bears the name of the vanished fortress.