31-Dec-2017

Restoration of the Entrance to the upper castle, entrance area, socalled snails wall and wrought iron door to the castle´s yard

In the autumn of 2017 we got to our utter surprise the opportunity by means of "Deutsche Stiftung Denkmalschutz", "Stadt Altdorf", the "Landkreises Nürnberger Land" and the county of Mittelfranken to restore the upper entrance region of the inner yard of the castle and to recreate the original colours of the façade. The "Bayerische Landesamt für Denkmalpflege" participated with money out of a special fund. Since then these parts of the castle regained their former splendour.
While restoring the door to the outer castle Yard our smith found under many layers of paint a beautifull wrought-iron Renaissance middlepiece. With much muscle power he took of many layers of paint, reforged parts destroyed by rust and gave new life to the door which only because of our bullheadedness hadn´t been already thrown away. We turned the inside out, so that one can see the two fools . In this way the old door became our latest "jewel":

The so called Snails wall and the entrance turret have been plastered and squared with white lines in the way of the old findings all over the castle. You can find the original plastering at the old parapet wall, at the north side of the "snails wall" and in the big staircase of the palas.
On the archway one can see a change between dark and light red plasterings. This stems not from our fantasy but can be found as well in the old findings in the left part of the archway.
Because of the clashing of the colours of the plastering and the red and white strped colouring of the portal we went back to the colouring of before 1910.
We couldn´t let it be unpainted because of too many patches and wounds in the old wood, therefore we painted it in the colour of dark wood..
In our archives we found a letter written by cousin Wilhelm in 1910 concerning the portal: Please don´t paint the portal striped in white and red (the colours of our coat of arms) This is too kitschy.
Since we could in between as well tackle the restauration of the so called "Verwaltershaus" whose façade is as well plastered and squared we reach our goal to hold the castle as well for coming centuries a little more.