Burg Berne

The Burg Berne was a small medieval motte-and-bailey castle built by the Counts of Oldenburg after their victory over the Stedinger farmers in 1234. It stood on a low mound beside the little river Berne, just west of the village centre in the present-day Wesermarsch district. The counts needed a lookout to watch the old road from Bremen to Oldenburg via Huntebrück and Stadland. A wooden tower on the mound was all that the Bremen archbishops would allow, fearing the castle would block river trade. By the 1250s two stronger stone castles nearby made Berne unnecessary, and after 1258 no more counts signed charters there. The last mention is in 1498, when the tower still appeared in tax records. Today only a grassy rise about one metre high remains of the mound. The surrounding ditch once carried water from the Berne stream, but it is now filled in. The outline of the small eastern bailey can still be traced in the field. Visitors walk across the quiet farmland and look for the low earthworks that mark where the wooden tower once stood.