Felddieksboll

The Felddieksboll is a motte in a wooded area belonging to the Loxten estate near Nortrup in the Osnabrück district of Lower Saxony. A motte is a type of castle built on an artificial mound, and this one stands out as the best preserved in the district. The mound measures about 70 metres across and still rises roughly 6 metres high. Around it once ran a double ditch filled with water, with a rampart between them. The ditches are 5 to 8 metres wide, the rampart has a base width of 10 metres and still stands about 1.3 metres high. Water from the surrounding ditches feeds into the Reitbach stream through a network of ponds and channels. Experts believe the Felddieksboll may have been an earlier structure for the nearby moated castle Gut Loxten. A nearly square wooded area borders a body of water to the northeast, and an old survey map from 1788 shows this wood with a short ditch running east–west across its northern part. The site’s defences were levelled on the northern half and partly disturbed by a First World War ammunition bunker linked to a nearby clay-pigeon shooting range. Visitors walk around the mound and look down into the wide, water-filled ditches that once protected the tower. The surviving rampart still shows how the defences were arranged. The wooded surroundings and the nearby pond add to the quiet, rural setting. The site gives a clear picture of how such motte castles were built and used in the Middle Ages.