Schloss Ermschwerd

Schloss Ermschwerd stands at the eastern edge of Ermschwerd village, just west of the L 3238 road and below the Burgberg. It is a grand three-storey manor house built on a former estate of the Buttlar family, surrounded by residential and farm buildings. A small park with mature trees stretches south and east of the house.

The building is a fine example of late-Gothic half-timbering with curtain-arch windows typical of North Hesse and southern Lower Saxony. The front is dominated by a two-flight staircase leading to a 1616 Renaissance portal framed in rectangular stonework. Above the portal are the Buttlar and Boyneburg coats of arms with the date 1616, and inscription bands naming Asmus von Buttlar and Margarethe von Boyneburg. The two upper timber floors project slightly, their panels filled with herring-bone bracing and carved ‘wild men’.

At the rear a four-storey polygonal stair tower from 1586 carries a Baroque dome and small turret. The north-east wing, added in the same year, once connected to a later 19th-century wing that has since been removed, leaving an open courtyard. A single-storey stone ‘Marstall’ with a large round arch was built in 1596 at the western end of the courtyard.