Burg Friedland

Burg Friedland stands on a steep slope above the Leine valley in southern Lower Saxony. Built around 1280, it guarded a narrow point where the river is only one kilometre wide. The welf dukes used it to mark their border with Hesse and Thuringia. Nearby on the opposite bank lies the older Madeburg. A second welf outpost, the Brackenburg near Münden, was raised in 1351 to watch the same frontier. The medieval stronghold had a main castle and a western bailey. The main castle contained two buildings and a six-storey keep, all enclosed by a curtain wall and dry ditch. Flanking towers stood at the corners of the rectangle. The bailey, about sixty metres long, housed storerooms and servants’ quarters. Today the wooded hill still shows ramparts, the deep ditch and a small exposed stretch of wall. Excavators found 13th-century dry-stone work beneath later mortar masonry and uncovered the skeleton of a young man executed by breaking on the wheel. For centuries the castle served as the welf vogt’s court and administrative seat. Duke Otto I once lived there in the late 14th century. After the Thirty Years War Wallenstein destroyed the fortress in 1625 and its stones were reused for new public buildings in the village below. Friedland itself grew from a mill and farmstead into a small farming settlement first recorded in 1401.