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Topic1688–1697: the destruction of the Rhine castles
Most of the ruins in the gorge share a single cause and, within a few years, a single date. It was not slow decay; it was deliberate demolition by engineers.
The campaign
In the War of the Palatine Succession, French forces moved through the Rhineland with orders to render its fortifications unusable. This was not incidental damage in the course of fighting. It was a systematic programme carried out by sappers with powder, against buildings that in most cases had already surrendered.
Stahleck was blown up on 15 March 1689; the charge destroyed the ring wall and the keep outright. Stolzenfels and the Schönburg were wrecked in the same year. Across the region the tally runs to dozens of castles and several towns.
How a castle was slighted
The method was economical. Charges were placed in the base of the keep and at the angles of the curtain, on the reasoning that a tower with one side gone cannot be repaired cheaply and a curtain broken at its corners cannot be re-closed. Roofs were burned. Wells were filled or fouled.
What survives on most sites is therefore a specific pattern: fragments of wall standing to considerable height where the powder did not reach, and nothing at all where it did. Learning to read that pattern is most of the skill in visiting a ruin.
Afterwards
Quarrying did more damage than the demolition. A ruined castle above a village is a heap of dressed stone with a road already cut to it, and through the eighteenth century that is exactly how these sites were used. Rheinfels lost more masonry to local builders than to the French.
The buildings that escaped — the Marksburg, Pfalzgrafenstein, the Maus — did so through accidents of position and ownership rather than any quality of their own.