The castles which are today such an unmistakable feature of the Rhein landscape date back to the Middle Ages. Their founders were feudal overloards, who, so far from cherishing any romantic notions, built them with one simple aim in mind: to protect their lands from marauders and predatory neighbours. They chose mountain-tops as strategically ideal situations, and we today, looking back through the haze of ninteenth-century medievalism, are still often prone to see them as objects of mystery and splendour, forgetting the warlike function for which they were built and the back-breaking labour of the feudal serfs, whom we must presume to have been forcibly employed in quarring the huge stone blocks and dragging them up the mountain slopes.