In Lower Austria along and atop the foothills of the mountains, there is an abundance of castle ruins that used to be the front line of defence for Styria against the invading hordes from the plains.
This network of castles also watched over trading routes that led deep into the Alps.
Castle Emmerberg served both purposes as a front line defence and trade route protection.
The story goes that originally atop the rocky outcrop was a small chapel and a single hut nearby where an old man and his son lived. The son would have to trudge up and down the rocky spur each day to fetch water from the stream below.
One day, the son while fetching water, encountered a hunter to whom he offered a drink of his hard won water. Telling the hunter of the chapel and where he lived, the hunter accompanied him to the top. Upon meeting the old father, the hunter then offered to take the boy to Vienna and present him at the Dukes court where he would trained and looked after. When questioned by the old man who the hunter was, he replied, "I am Duke Leopold!" The grateful father agreed. The boy was trained as a knight and sometime later returned and established a castle on the site where his former home was, naming it Emmerberg (Bucket Castle).
Whether the story is factual or not, water was always an issue for the castle.
The main damage done to the castle was in 1760 when the owner Duke Heinrich von Heussenstein, had the roof removed to pay the roof tax that the Habsburgs had levied. Taxes no matter the time in history had senseless reasons. The weather then started the decay. This was further accelerated by the site being robbed of its stone work for other local buildings in the valley below.
Humans are humans, and some will always find the urge to leave there mark behind in the form of graffiti. Thankfully on this site, there is still more older graffiti than modern.
The ruins are in bad shape with large sections of stonework periodically collapsing, thus visiting the site must be done with caution. The walls are so decrepit that trees now grow on them.
The only things missing are a dragon, treasure or a vampire.
That place looks like it would be so much fun to (very carefully) explore!
It was! Its the second time I've been there. We spent several hours there. It really gets your imagination going. I've been slowly researching the region and learning about the history. Today it looks like a quiet rural backwater, but in its day, this was a military frontier with trade routes going deep into the Alps.
The history goes back further to the Romans, the Celts and to Neolithic times as the many caves in the region were then inhabited.
Oh wow, that's definitely quite a history! Makes one (or at least me XD) wonder about the people that walked/lived on it before and how different it might have looked then.
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