Wasserburg Rohr

The Wasserburg Rohr was a small medieval motte-and-bailey castle built on a tiny island in the Upper Lake of Rohr Park. The park lies in a shallow dip west of Stuttgart’s Schönbuchstraße, its two triangular lakes fed by the Schlattbach stream. The Upper Lake’s island, called Seebuckel, measures only 20–22 metres across and once held a tower house with a drawbridge. The castle’s first owners were the Lords of Rohr, vassals of the Counts of Tübingen, who appear in records from 1271. By 1287 it was already destroyed during fighting between King Rudolf of Habsburg and Count Eberhard of Württemberg. Other accounts place its end in the Reichskrieg of 1311–12. Later, a village fire in 1553 may have consumed any remaining timbers. In 1851 the art historian Eduard Paulus recorded thick stone walls and roof tiles among the ruins, all now lost. Visitors today walk a flat path through the park’s meadows to the lakes. Near the Upper Lake stands a carved wooden stele marking the vanished drawbridge, its inscription noting oak beams dug up in 1952 and set in place in 1964. A relief stone from the vanished chapel shows scenes from Christ’s Passion and is kept in the city’s lapidary collection. Two worn boundary stones bearing the letter R and a cross also stand by the water, silent reminders of Rohr’s past.