Burg Warberg

Burg Warberg stands on the eastern edge of the Elm ridge in eastern Lower Saxony. Built in the early 13th century as a water castle by the noble Warberg family, it replaced an earlier fort two kilometres to the southwest destroyed in 1199. The site divides into a south-western upper ward and a north-eastern lower ward, each surrounded by remnants of the old moat up to 15 metres wide.

The upper ward centres on a square keep with arrow slits, about eight metres on each side and nineteen metres tall. Around it once stood a three-storey Renaissance building shown on a 1654 engraving, now reduced to two storeys with a 16th-century ornamental doorway. The lower ward’s courtyard is framed by stone buildings including a three-storey main house and a chapel first mentioned in 1346, while a half-timbered structure on a stone base once housed a distillery.

Visitors walk along the surviving stretches of the wide moat and the outer rampart thirty-eight metres long, fourteen metres wide and nearly four metres high. The ring wall still encloses the two wards, and the keep’s plateau offers views across the Elm hills. The buildings inside now serve an agricultural training college, but the medieval fabric remains visible beneath later alterations.