Düsselburg

The Düsselburg is a ring-wall fort from the early Middle Ages standing on a gentle slope about three kilometres north-west of Rehburg in Lower Saxony. It occupies a flat-topped rise on the edge of the sandy Kiebitzberg ridge. A loop of the Meerbach stream, flowing roughly fifty metres to the south-west, once gave the site natural protection. Archaeologists date the surviving earthwork to the 8th–10th centuries. In 1904 Carl Schuchhardt cut trenches through the rampart and found Iron Age pottery, iron slag and post-holes from buildings. A 2018 LiDAR survey stripped away the trees and revealed the true shape of the defences. The finds show that people had already used the hilltop in the 1st–4th centuries BC. Today the oval rampart, about one metre high and ten metres wide, still encircles a grassy interior used for grazing. A broad ditch once ran outside the wall, and traces of a palisade and a paved gateway survive. Visitors can walk the perimeter and see the flat entrance chamber where the old timbers once stood. The site is marked by a ring of trees that makes it visible from a distance.