Marsh castle

Marsh castles were mostly built on mounds within these landscapes, in a similar way to a Wallburg.

In some places, however, an adjacent area of marsh or bog was simply used for protection on one or more sides and the castle itself was built on solid land, as was the case with the first castle in Danzig (modern Gdansk), for example.

[1] Most castles of this type were built in the lowlands of rivers flowing into the East and North Sea between Lower Saxony and Mecklenburg.

Marsh castles are historically one of the oldest types of castle and were built as early as the Early Middle Ages by the Slavic peoples in the aforementioned areas.

According to Swiss historians, a marsh castle can be defined in the broadest sense as a complex whose outer defences are built up by exploiting natural obstacles, such as meandering river courses, marshes and bogs, as protection [2] or which are built on mounds entirely within these obstacles.