Burg Tannenberg

Burg Tannenberg rises on a spur of the Herzberg above the village of Nentershausen in the Richelsdorfer Gebirge. The 14th-century castle replaced an earlier fortification recorded in a Hersfeld charter as long abandoned. Its rectangular core, fifty metres long and twenty-five wide, is built of tuff blocks quarried nearby. The Baumbach family held the castle as a Hersfeld fief from the 1330s. Ludwig I, first of the line to bear the title Ritter, enlarged the stronghold and erected the ‘Stone House’, the oldest surviving building. Later owners raised the four-storey residential tower between 1375 and 1555, adding a chapel with a Gothic oriel and ribbed vault whose double-hollow-chamfered ribs meet a boss carved with oak leaves. A two-metre-thick curtain wall rebuilt in 2001 now closes the north-west corner, while the east wall still stands eight metres high. Visitors enter through a gatehouse whose medieval portcullis slot is still visible. The cobbled courtyard divides the northern range, with the Stone House and a three-storey manor rebuilt for Ludwig VII and Ewald von Baumbach, from the southern range. There the residential tower shelters the chapel, and beside it a former dwelling now houses the castle inn. At the south-east corner fragments of the zwinger survive, complete with battlements, arrow slits and a trace of the wall-walk. Below the spur, the ruins of a three-gated building once served the landgrave’s domain or the Erfurt trade route.