Burg Adelebsen

Burg Adelebsen stands on a sandstone crag above the village of Adelebsen, fifteen kilometres west of Göttingen. The rock spur juts from the Solling uplands and drops thirty metres in a steep slope to the Schwülme valley. A medieval stronghold grew here in the 13th century when the lords of Wibbecke moved from their nearby seat to the crag and built the first buildings. By 1295 the place was called a castle, and over the next hundred years it was enlarged in several building phases. The fortress was badly damaged in 1466 and again in the Thirty Years War, but rebuilt from about 1650 onwards. In 1740 the owners filled the defensive ditch and turned the medieval castle into a baroque residence. They added a deep castle well with a treadwheel, a forestry house in 1685, and a rent office in the rococo style. The last male heir of the Adelebsen family died in 1957, and the estate passed to a private foundation that still cares for the buildings and surrounding farmland. Visitors enter through the single surviving gate in the northern curtain wall. The nine-storey keep, examined by burgenforscher Joachim Zeune, rises above the courtyard; its lower three floors date from the late 14th century, the upper six from the 15th. The thick walls taper from more than four metres at the base to under two metres at the top, and the second and third floors still show their original fireplaces. The keep now shelters the largest colony of breeding jackdaws in southern Lower Saxony. North of the main castle lies the separated outer ward with the 17th-century forestry house and the rococo rent office, while below the crag the farmyard contains further stables and barns.