Maus Castle

Building began in the 1350s under Archbishop-Elector Boemund II of Trier, who planned the castle above Wellmich under the name St Peterseck; his successors Kuno II von Falkenstein and Werner von Falkenstein carried the work to completion between 1362 and 1388. It was built to enforce the Rhine toll rights Trier had recently acquired and to hold the electorate's border against the Counts of Katzenelnbogen, whose Burg Katz stood close by and whose Rheinfels faced the site from the far bank. A second Trier castle, St Petersberg, was intended to match it but was never built.

In the second half of the fourteenth century the castle served the Electors of Trier as an occasional residence. The electoral living-tower on the west side went up under Boemund II as a four-storey block of roughly seven by eight and a half metres, one room to a floor; under Kuno von Falkenstein a second range of much the same size was added to the north, giving two heated rooms on each level, the newer of them with a latrine turret and the lordly bedchamber.

The core is almost square, built of slate quarried on the spot, and the defences are concentrated on the eastern side facing the hill, the main line of attack. There a round bergfried thirty-three metres high and eight across stands half-proud of a shield wall ten metres high, flanked by a square corner turret to the south-east and an octagonal one to the north; its fighting platform has only four loops, and the tower was reached in its day by a wooden ladder that could be drawn up. A wall-walk on a corbelled round-arch frieze of basalt brackets runs right round the castle beneath the roofs. Outside, a zwinger wrapped the lower court and a steep neck ditch was cut into the rock, and the approach ran past the ditch along the north side and over a drawbridge into the gatehouse beside the living-tower.

The nickname is folklore. The Counts of Katzenelnbogen, who had meanwhile raised the larger Neukatzenelnbogen nearby — Burg Katz in common speech — are said to have mocked the electors during the thirty years of building by calling their castle the mouse that the cat would eat; the people of the district are credited with the joke as well. It is first recorded in 1744. The castle's own names were Peterseck, Thurnberg and Deuernburg.

Unlike its two neighbours, Burg Maus was never destroyed; it decayed instead, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by some accounts, only from the eighteenth by others. In 1806 it was sold for demolition to Friedrich Gustav Habel, who wanted to keep it standing. Victor Hugo gave it a chapter of its own in his account of the Rhine published in 1840. Between 1900 and 1906 the architect Wilhelm Gärtner rebuilt the castle with attention to historical detail, leaving the outward appearance largely as it had been.

The bergfried's fighting platform gained an added top stage in 1924. Shelling in the Second World War damaged the castle again, and that damage has since been made good. For decades until the end of 2010 an eagle and falcon centre was housed in the castle. The castle is a protected Kulturdenkmal, and since 2002 it has stood within the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Upper Middle Rhine Valley.