Burg Bommersheim

Burg Bommersheim stands on the eastern edge of Bommersheim, a village now part of Oberursel in the Taunus hills. The site lies behind the parish church of St Aureus and Justina, between the Langen Straße and Burgstraße. It once overlooked the Kalbach lowlands where an ancient trade route crossed the Saalburg road. The first traces of the castle date from the 11th or 12th century, when a wooden tower stood on an earthen mound about ten metres wide. A deep ditch and a wooden palisade protected the small motte, and fragments of painted pottery confirm its early date.

The castle was rebuilt in the 13th century as a stone ring-wall castle with a polygonal curtain wall thirty-five metres across. Inside, buildings lined the wall in a continuous row, their roofs facing outward. A wide, wet moat surrounded the whole structure, and the interior was raised with rubble. Archaeologists have found that the castle was later destroyed by gunfire, including early cannon balls of basalt, one of the earliest such finds in Germany. The site also yielded everyday objects from the 13th and 14th centuries, from cooking pots and glass beakers to iron keys and a crowned lance tip.

Today the low earthworks and buried walls are protected as archaeological monuments. Visitors can walk the outline of the ring wall and see where the moat once ran. Nearby, the Vortaunus Museum in Oberursel displays many of the finds, including leather clothing, pilgrim badges and fragments of the stone window frames. The churchyard overlaps part of the old castle, and the quiet lanes around the site still follow the medieval trade routes.