Ruine Plixholz: A Ruined Fortified House in Geisenheim, Germany
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 3.1
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Medieval
- Eras represented
- Medieval
- Civilizations
- Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Military
- Remains
- Castle
On this page7 sections
History
Ruine Plixholz is the ruin of a fortified house in Geisenheim, Germany, in the Rheingau mountains north of Rüdesheim am Rhein-Windeck. Associated with the regional Brömser family, the complex is generally dated to the fourteenth century and formed part of a landscape shaped by woodland clearance, agriculture, and viticulture.
Clearance and medieval development
The Plixholz area emerged as woodland was cleared for farming and livestock raising while the southern slopes of the Rheingau were being planted with vines. This process is tentatively placed around 1100, although its exact date is not established. The name may derive from the Old High German word plecchen, meaning “to flash,” “to expose,” or “to make visible,” perhaps referring to the cleared land.
The fortified house itself is generally assigned to the fourteenth century. Around 1390, the Brömser family built a chapel in the Nothgottes valley, at roughly the same time that the parish church of St James was being established in Rüdesheim. Rolf Göttert inferred from this chronology that Plixholz was already a residence for agricultural workers and had developed into a fortified house by that period. The site is first named in a Brömser charter from 1562.
Religious connections and early modern occupation
The foundation charter of Nothgottes Monastery was signed at Plixholz in 1621. The fortified house was made available to the Capuchin Order, a branch of the Franciscan religious order, to provide for the monks. Plixholz returned to the Brömser family in 1666. The reason for this change is unknown, although labour shortages connected with the Thirty Years’ War and the plague have been suggested. The war, fought from 1618 to 1648, brought severe disruption, population loss, and economic decline to the Rhine region.
When the Brömser line ended in 1668, ownership passed to Baron von Metternich. Calvinists, followers of the Reformed Protestant tradition associated with John Calvin, lived at Plixholz from 1675 until 1760. An important record of the complex was made in 1740, when the Rüdesheim surveyor Andreas Trauttner prepared a map that later became the basis for reconstructing its former layout.
Decline and modern changes
The Metternich family sold Plixholz to Baron von Zwierlein in 1812. The Zwierleins purchased Nothgottes Monastery the following year, after Napoleon Bonaparte’s political and administrative reforms had led to its secularization, meaning the transfer of the religious property out of ecclesiastical control. The monastery was abandoned in 1813. Its remaining church equipment, including stained-glass windows, was largely sold, while both the monastery and Plixholz were allowed to deteriorate. Plixholz was no longer habitable by the first half of the nineteenth century.
In 1903, Emma Frohn, the widow of a lawyer, bought Nothgottes and Plixholz. She restored the monastery buildings and established an agricultural operation there to replace the one formerly based at Plixholz. During this period, the Rüdesheim architect Müller made a plan of the surviving masonry. The properties passed to the Diocese of Limburg, a territorial administrative unit of the Christian church headed by a bishop, in 1932 after years of economic crisis. In 1950, the last remains of the enclosure wall were levelled to create arable land.
A ground collapse in the Plixholz field in 1970 brought further evidence of the buried complex to light. Clay extraction caused a hole about two metres across to open in an otherwise open field. At a depth of three metres, the cavity widened into a bell-shaped space containing remains of a timber lining.
Remains
Layout and enclosure
Ruine Plixholz occupies a small woodland beside the Weibspfad, a medieval road, and is surrounded by land used for agriculture. Nothgottes Monastery lies about 600 metres to the south. The former fortified house consisted of a broad enclosing wall with two round towers on its southern side. Four houses stood within the enclosure, while the associated estate extended across approximately 11 hectares of arable fields, meadows, and small woodland areas.
The site is now completely overgrown, so much of the surviving evidence appears as changes in the ground surface rather than as standing architecture. Masonry remains survive in the eastern part of the former complex. Trauttner’s 1740 map and Müller’s later plan provide the basis for understanding the arrangement of the enclosure and its buildings.
Water supply and underground structures
The surviving remains include a tower-shaped draw well, a well from which water was raised, and an underground vaulted structure. The vault is a cellar-like chamber with a curved masonry roof, and its access was sometimes sealed with masonry. These features preserve evidence of the fortified house’s practical infrastructure as well as its defensive and residential character.
The subsurface feature revealed by the 1970 collapse lay three metres below ground. Its bell-shaped cavity contained remains of a timber lining. Together with the masonry surviving in the eastern part of the site, this underground evidence forms the principal physical record of a complex whose walls and buildings have largely disappeared beneath woodland and cultivated land.
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