The Schellenberg castles, two ruins with swapped names

Two ruins on top of an isolated hill, a few hundred metres apart, with views over the Rhine valley and into Austria. The Schellenberg castles don’t have the fame of Vaduz or the silhouette of Gutenberg, but to me they’re the most rewarding ruins in the country, because you walk up to them, you can make sense of what you’re looking at and there’s hardly anyone about.

The lords who named a lordship

The lords of Schellenberg settled on the Eschnerberg before 1180 and from the late 12th century built their two castles here to watch over the road to Italy. In 1317 Marquard of Schellenberg sold them with all their rights to the counts of Werdenberg-Heiligenberg, and they passed through the Montfort-Tettnangs, the Brandis, the Sulz and the Hohenems families before reaching the House of Liechtenstein in 1699, along with the lordship. So it was the lords who gave their name to the territory, not the other way round, and that lordship is today’s Unterland. The village they stand in is covered on Schellenberg.

In the early 16th century at least one was still standing, because in 1505 Ludwig von Brandis promised to keep a Schellenberg castle open to Austria in time of war. By 1616 the Hohenems chronicle described them as broken. Their fate changed in 1956, when Prince Franz Josef II handed them to the Historischer Verein, and the society set about digging and consolidating both sites.

Why are the names the wrong way round?

This is my favourite thing about the pair. The upper castle was originally the old one, Alt-Schellenberg, and the lower one the new, Neu-Schellenberg, and excavation has confirmed that’s right. But in the 18th century someone swapped the names, and for a long time the upper one was taken to be the newer. The archaeologist Jakob Bill suggested simply calling them the Obere Burg and Untere Burg, upper and lower, and that’s how they’re known today. The mistake lives on in OpenStreetMap, which still labels the upper ruin Neu-Schellenberg.

The Obere Burg, up top

It stands about 700 metres north-east of the parish church, at 668 metres. It’s first recorded in 1348, and David Beck excavated and conserved it between 1960 and 1964. The layout is triangular, protected to the south by a wide ditch and a drystone wall, and it keeps remains of the outer ward, the shield wall, the keep, the great hall and other buildings, as well as the cistern.

Beck attributed the core walls and part of the curtain to the first phase, in the late 12th century. Burn layers have been linked to the Appenzell War of 1405, and the finds run from before the mid-12th century to the 16th, mostly from the 13th and 14th. The tourist board presents it as one of the country’s favourite outings, reached on a short walk.

The Untere Burg, lower down

It lies about 400 metres north of the church, at 595 metres, and is first recorded in 1364. Jakob Bill excavated it between 1978 and 1980. Part of the keep in the north-east, the curtain wall with rooms built against it and an outwork beyond a ditch to the south-west were conserved, and a bread oven was rebuilt inside. The building changes that could be dated run from the second half of the 13th century to the 15th, and there’s no trace here of the 1405 fire. Prehistoric objects turned up on the same knoll, though no signs of a settlement.

Before the castles

The hill was lived on long before the lords of Schellenberg. The Lexikon says Bronze Age remains turned up on the Untere Burg’s knoll and on the nearby Borscht, where pits and hut hearths were found, and that the settlements by both hills stayed in use in later periods because they were so well protected. The medieval lords didn’t invent the spot, they inherited it.

How to see them

They’re open-air ruins and no official source gives them opening hours or a price. I’d take route 33 up to Schellenberg, head to the upper ruin first and then drop down to the lower one, a good hour without rushing. Between the two sits the village’s rural museum, open two Sundays a month from April to October, which I cover on the Schellenberg farmhouse museum.

Both ruins also lie on the historic ridge path of the Eschnerberg and on stage 5 of the Liechtenstein Trail, which climbs up from the Ruggeller Riet. If you’re curious about the country’s other castles, from Vaduz to Gutenberg, I compare them on castles in Liechtenstein.