On Saturday, I showed you the many Gates we had to enter to get into the interior areas of Marksburg Castle.
After entering the gates, we were now on the exterior of the Great Hall.
And it was Spring, so there were tiny gardens tucked in here and there around the castle that were a nice surprise.
Right off the Great Hall is the first of two Batteries, built in the 1700’s, for housing artillery (cannons and such) and this is the Small Battery. Notice the windows where the cannons inside the Battery were aimed at the Rhine below.
Here our friend Jerry inspects the Breech Loader of 1450 in the Small Battery. This was evidently an important piece of artillery. I am not into artillery, but we were told quite a bit about how unique it was and how impressive it was to have had one during the fifteenth century.
Next we moved on to the Great Battery. As you can see, they were doing some digging for reconstruction purposes. We found this everywhere we toured in Germany. This Battery is much larger and had quite a few more cannons facing the Rhine. Parts of this Battery date to the 1500’s.
There were cannons of all sizes here. And look at those stone cannon balls on the right. They were heavy.
With the varied sizes of cannons and balls, the defenders could project havoc clear on the other side of the Rhine from this vantage point.
These would not be fun to have to move around. They were built to stay put. I cannot imagine them being brought up the hill from below. I wonder if they were built on site at the castle itself? Maybe I should have asked.
Here is a view of the Rhine below from the Great Battery.
And here you can see our ship, the Viking Ingvi.
The ship had docked at a park below the castle in Braubach. But it wasn’t quite time for us to head back down to the park, we still had a lot of castle left to see.
Next we toured the gardens of Marksburg Castle.
This is not a sponsored post. This is my experience from my trip with Viking River Cruises. Email me to find out how you can save $100 when you book your first cruise with Viking through their referral program.
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