Tour of the Courtyard @museum.de

The courtyard is enclosed by the castle’s four wings. The east wing, in the direction of the town, contains the princely family’s apartments. The north wing houses guest rooms and the library. And our museum occupies rooms in the south and west wings.

From the outside, the towers look rather like a snail shell, don’t you think? Behind their façades, spiral staircases lead upwards. Locally, these corkscrew towers are known as “Schneckentürme” – snail towers.

Then there are the handsome gargoyles disguised as dragons on the façade. They divert the rainwater all away from the wall and send a powerful jet gushing to the ground.

Beneath an arch on the right-hand side, above a green bench, hangs the model of a covered bridge. If you’d like to see a real one, you could visit the village of Bächlingen. Although the original covered bridge was blown up at the end of the Second World War, it has since been rebuilt. A historic covered bridge, built in 1821 and ‘22, also crosses the River Jagst in Unterregenbach, a district of Langenburg. It’s less than four kilometres on foot from here – around two and a half miles. Covered bridges keep pedestrians out of the rain, but they were also used to dry grain, for example.

Next to the gateway leading to the oldest part of the complex, there’s an ancient stone, carved with a heraldic device: two leopards passant, that is, striding to the left. That’s the Hohenlohe coat of arms. It dates to around 1230, when Gottfried and Conrad zu Hohenlohe served as advisors to the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick the Second and owned estates in Italy. In the late 19th century, the coat of arms was discovered at the Castello di Monopoli in Apulia by Cardinal Gustav zu Hohenlohe. He had it brought to Langenburg.

At the next stop – also here in the courtyard – we’ll tell you about the various architectural styles that make our castle so distinctive.