Vorwerke der Burg Ehrenberg

The Vorwerke of Burg Ehrenberg stand along the northern approaches to Tirol, built when the sixteenth-century wars made frontier defence vital. The Gumpp brothers, working for Archduke Leopold V and his widow Claudia, turned temporary earthworks into permanent masonry forts during the Thirty Years War. Each site blocked a narrow pass or river crossing where invaders might slip past the main castle. The ensemble includes the Ehrwalder Schanze in the Loisach gorge, the Gacht redoubt above Weißenbach, and the Kniepass star-fort whose steep road and Lech-side cliffs made it a key post. Roßschlägschanze, built by Innsbruck militiamen under Captain Mor, and the Lechschanze opposite Kniepass, both show how the Gumpps added towers, palisades and wet ditches. Even smaller works like the wooden barrier at Pinswang and the Torsäule near Plansee once formed part of the chain. Today visitors walk grassy ramparts and restored stretches of the Kniepass fort, where a rondell and walled courtyard recall 1694. At the Gacht pass the remains of the 1645 curtain wall stand beside the later redoubt, while the Lechschanze’s bastion and ditch survive on the riverbank. The Ehrwalder Schanze still guards the gorge, and scattered traces of Roßschlägschanze mark the narrows where Mor’s men once stood. Together these ruins form one of central Europe’s most complete early-modern fortification systems.