Rock castle

If the rock is easy to work (e.g. sandstone), rooms, passages, steps, well shafts and cisterns were invariably hacked out of it.

Rock castles occur in large numbers in the southern Palatinate (Palatinate Forest), in northern Alsace (North Vosges) as well as in North Bohemia and Saxon Switzerland, where great sandstone rocks provide the necessary prerequisite for their construction.

Often the site was slighted and then used by local residents as a stone quarry, so that apart from man-made alterations to the rocks themselves, only a few traces are still visible.

From a constructional point of view there is a close relationship with cave castles, which are also often enhanced with rooms artificially cut out of the rock.

The shapes carved out of the rock, such as foundation footings and putlock holes, are often wrongly interpreted by laymen as prehistoric or early history heathen cult sites.