Hexenturm (Walberberg): A Medieval Defensive Tower in Germany
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.3
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Medieval
- Eras represented
- Medieval
- Civilizations
- Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Military
- Remains
- Tower
On this page7 sections
History
Hexenturm (Walberberg) is a five-storey medieval round tower in Walberberg, Germany, beside the parish church of St. Walburga. It may have originated in the twelfth or thirteenth century as the Bergfried, or principal defensive tower, of a castle complex. The builder is unknown, and the date of the castle’s destruction has not been established. A possible connection with the Cologne War, a sixteenth-century conflict that affected the Electorate of Cologne, remains uncertain.
Possible medieval origins
Earlier interpretations linked the possible castle with Countess Alveradis. With the permission of Archbishop Sigewin, she endowed a memorial foundation at the church of St. Walburgisberge, where her father and son were buried and where she wished to be buried herself. This foundation led to the establishment of the Walberberg convent between 1079 and 1089. The relationship between Alveradis’s castle and the surviving tower remains possible rather than proven.
Later historians identified the tower as the keep of a castle belonging to the Counts of Saffenberg, but their responsibility for its construction has not been demonstrated. The first known owners were the von Holtorp family, who are recorded in Walberberg in 1384. Conrad von Holtorp, the son of the knight Ulrich von Holtorp, is said to have lived in the tower with his wife Styna, also known as Christine Birklin or Birkelin, a Cologne patrician. In 1388, Conrad sold the tower, its associated properties, and its rights to Cologne Cathedral Chapter. The von Holtorp family was not subsequently recorded in connection with Walberberg.
From ecclesiastical property to protected monument
After secularization, the state confiscation and dissolution of ecclesiastical institutions and their property around 1802, the unused property entered private ownership in 1807 under Geuer, a former corvée official. His son-in-law Scheben later inherited it and sold it in 1843 to Johann Peter Weyer, a Cologne architect and municipal master builder.
Weyer tried to promote the tower and its picturesque surroundings as an excursion destination, but abandoned the plan because an old Jewish cemetery lay within the tower grounds. As the deteriorating tower faced demolition in 1858, efforts by Bonn district administrator Carl von Sandt, represented in Cologne by Regierungspräsident Eduard von Moeller, secured its transfer to the Prussian state treasury. The transfer included the tower and surrounding land measuring 25 Ruten, approximately 350 square metres.
The tower and the adjacent parish church of St. Walburga remain widely visible landmarks of Walberberg. The state of North Rhine-Westphalia owns the Hexenturm, which has been protected as an architectural monument since 1980. From January to March 2005, the LVR Office for Archaeological Monument Preservation in the Rhineland undertook a building-historical investigation, documentation, and archival study. The results supported a cautious dating of the round tower to the twelfth or thirteenth century. Extensive restoration and structural securing followed in 2006.
Remains
Form and construction
The free-standing tower stands on gently sloping ground in the centre of Walberberg, immediately north of the medieval parish church. Its base lies at approximately 95 metres above sea level. The structure rises 18.30 metres and has an external diameter of 8.60 metres. Its walls measure 2.20 metres thick at the base and taper to 0.90 metres in the uppermost storey.
Large quantities of reused Roman cast concrete, known as opus caementicium, were incorporated into the masonry. This material was made from aggregate bound with mortar, and came here from the ancient Eifel aqueduct. Some reused fragments retain sinter deposits, while parts remain visible inside the unplastered tower. The builders also used tuff and trachyte from the Drachenfels, together with basalt blocks from the Brohl Valley.
Entrances and interior arrangement
The ground floor has the tower’s thickest masonry and was built without an entrance, presumably to strengthen its security. Access originally seems to have been by ladder through an opening on the east side of the first upper storey. That former entrance survives as a blocked opening. A later entrance was cut at ground level on the eastern side, leading by a sturdy wooden staircase to the first upper storey, where a beam ceiling was inserted at a later date.
The first upper storey may have functioned as a living room. Its window-seat niches, slight traces of painting, and large stone wall fireplace indicate an occupied interior. Beneath the surrounding cornice, the walls once carried a red, brick-based coating that may have been a specialised slurry plaster. Above the cornice, indistinct mural remains form eleven alternating red and blue-black panels separated by painted white lines representing joints.
A fireplace and further window-seat niches occupy the second storey. A narrow stone staircase built within the wall thickness rises to the next level, while the higher storeys follow a similar arrangement. The lower levels generally have slit-like windows. By contrast, the uppermost storey ends in a rounded moulding and has a ring of round-arched windows.
Roof and later conservation
The flat cap at the top of the tower was added at the beginning of the 1930s as a conservation measure. Its form was probably based on an eighteenth-century painting, the oldest known depiction of the tower, which shows its condition during that period. The painting is located before the choir inside the parish church of St. Walburga.
Nearby sites
