Scheverlingenburg

The Scheverlingenburg stands in Walle, a village in the Gifhorn district of Lower Saxony. It was built during the pre-Roman Iron Age as a defensive earthwork between the Oker and Schunter rivers. The site occupied a naturally elevated plateau formed by the rivers’ confluence, making it an ideal spot for a fortification.

The site is worth visiting for its long and layered history. Archaeologists found a three-metre-deep ditch and ten-metre-wide trench in front of the surviving wall section. Excavations also uncovered rows of posts and pottery fragments from the fifth to seventh centuries BC. Later, in 1091, the place appears in records when Gertrud the Younger of Brunswick sought refuge there. The Welf family later inherited the site through Richenza of Northeim.

Visitors see a fifty-metre stretch of the old rampart, up to ten metres high and now covered with trees. The remains lie within private gardens in a modern housing estate and cannot be entered. The plateau still shows the shape of the original semicircular wall that once enclosed a riverside loop of the Schunter.