Oda Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

At the foot of the south-western ridge of Mount Hōkyō, about five kilometres south of Mount Tsukuba, excavations have made legible the evolution of a medieval lord's castle. The Oda family held the south of Hitachi Province from here for nearly four centuries and fifteen generations, and it was in this residence that, during the wars between the Northern and Southern Courts, Kitabatake Chikafusa wrote the Jinnō Shōtōki, a major text legitimising the southern imperial line. What surprises on this site is the layering of its successive states: a moat about four metres wide surrounded the original residence, whereas by the end of the Sengoku period the defences reached twenty to thirty metres in width, with compartmented moats and an outwork of some fifty metres in front of the south-west entrance. The finds speak of court life: ceramics imported from China, pottery from present-day Aichi and Gifu prefectures, banquet cups, lacquered bowls and go stones, but also weapons and pieces of armour. A former railway of the Tsukuba company once cut diagonally across the honmaru; its trackbed now carries the Rinrin Road cycle path, diverted to skirt the rampart. Reconstructed on the basis of the excavation results, with its earthworks, moats and water garden, the park now makes it possible to read the plan on the ground.