Last Updated: July 2026
Most castle facts are settled. A few are not. Construction dates drift between sources, a founding year is given three different ways, an operator’s own website contradicts itself, and a measurement turns out to describe something other than what everyone assumed. How a reference handles those cases says more about it than the facts everyone already agrees on.
This page collects real examples from across StoneKeep Atlas where the sources genuinely disagree, and shows what we did about each one. The rule is the same every time and it is set out in full in our editorial standards: when two credible sources conflict, we do not quietly pick the more convenient number, and we do not split the difference. We say the record is divided, we attribute each claim, and where a specific cannot be pinned down honestly we leave it out rather than invent certainty.
Dates the record does not agree on
Château de Langeais: when was the keep built?
Langeais has one of the oldest stone keeps in France, and its date is contested. The traditional attribution, repeated by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, gives “around 994” and credits Fulk Nerra, Count of Anjou. Dendrochronology carried out on the near-identical keep at nearby Loches, however, points to the early eleventh century, roughly 1012 to 1035. Both are defensible, and they cannot both be exact. We attribute the keep to Fulk Nerra and date it qualitatively, “around the year one thousand,” and we do not print a single hard year in either direction.
Schloss Drachenburg: 1881 or 1882?
The foundation stone of this Rhineland fantasy palace is dated to 1882 by the operator’s own history and by the German-language record, while a competing 1881 start date circulates in secondary sources. That building span, 1882 to 1884, is well supported. Because the exact foundation year is genuinely divided, any article that mentions Drachenburg in passing avoids the single year and refers to the early 1880s.
Château d’Ussé: when did the d’Espinay family acquire it?
One widely repeated source gives 1455; the operator and regional heritage records place the acquisition in 1485 to 1488. A 1462 marriage into the Bueil family sits awkwardly between the two and adds to the tension. Rather than choose, we date the acquisition to “the 1480s” and keep the marriage chronology as the reason the earlier date is doubtful.
Mespelbrunn: 1648 or 1658 for the Ingelheim marriage?
The marriage that carried this moated Spessart castle to the Ingelheim family is dated 1648 in one tradition, a tidy match with the Peace of Westphalia, and 1658 in the Historisches Lexikon Bayerns. Ten years apart, both from credible sources. Where we need to mention it, we phrase the transfer without the year rather than lend a false precision to whichever number a reader might carry away.
Marienberg Fortress: founded in 1229 or around 1250?
Würzburg’s hilltop fortress is given a span of roughly 1250 to 1720 by the operator and 1229 to 1720 by the Historisches Lexikon Bayerns, which turns a neat “466 years, from 1253” into something less certain at the front end. We hedge the opening to “nearly five centuries” and “the mid-thirteenth century,” and we do not launder either endpoint into a hard figure.
The Wartburg ink stain: when did it vanish?
Luther is said to have thrown his inkwell at the devil in the Lutherstube, and for centuries visitors were shown the mark. The Wartburg-Stiftung itself published the monograph that calls the story a legend: Hilmar Schwarz, Die Legende vom Tintenfleck (1991). Physical ink appears only in the late seventeenth century, more than a hundred years after Luther’s death, and it survived because visitors scraped fragments off the wall as relics and the wall was re-inked for the next arrivals.
When the renewals stopped is where the record thins. Accounts based on the Wartburg literature put the stain’s disappearance at about the beginning of the twentieth century, and note a temporary renewal as a modern art action. We have seen more precise dates quoted for the last refreshing and for the earliest photograph showing a blank wall, and we could not confirm either against a source we could open, so we do not print them. Our pages say the wall has been blank since about 1900, which is what the record will carry.
Measurements that describe different things
Château de Saumur: how high above the river does it stand?
Tourism material says the château stands “about 60 m above the Loire”; scholarship gives “about 40 m above the valley floor.” These are not two estimates of the same thing. Both are heights measured against a river or a valley, not an elevation above sea level, and a height quoted against a river is a different measurement from an altitude. No true metres-above-sea-level figure exists in any source we could find, so the guide describes the promontory in words and gives no number at all rather than dress a river-relative figure up as an altitude.
Wales: how many castles does the Welsh Government say there are?
Four different numbers, on three of its own websites, read on the same day. Cadw gives 427 on its castles page and over 600 on the page asking whether Wales is the castle capital of the world; on the same page as the 427 it says it looks after forty-four. wales.com says more than 400 at last count, and Visit Wales says over 641. Neither Cadw page carries a date. Its statutory schedule, which does have a rule, records 104 monuments whose site type is Castle. We print all of them with their sources rather than choosing one, because the spread is the finding: see the country with the most castles.
Is a tower house a castle?
Ireland says yes and Britain says beside. Ireland’s Sites and Monuments Record files Castle - tower house inside its castle group, 1,321 of them, and keeps a separate House - fortified house class as well, so the choice is considered rather than loose. Canmore, the FISH thesaurus and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales all place TOWER HOUSE under FORTIFIED HOUSE, a term their vocabularies relate to castle and never place beneath it. Neither is wrong. The counts simply cannot be added, and a national total moves by hundreds depending on which filing you accept.
Vaux-le-Vicomte: how long is the garden?
Figures from roughly three to four kilometres circulate for the great perspective at Vaux-le-Vicomte. They measure the full estate and its approach. The designed perspective that André Le Nôtre actually composed for a single viewer, from the château to the Farnese Hercules, is about a kilometre and a half, with the Grand Canal running nearly a kilometre across it. We commit to the designed figures and are explicit that the larger numbers describe the whole domain, not the view.
Château de Blois: how many panels in the study?
Blois’s carved study, or studiolo, is described with different panel counts in different places, and the operator’s own figure does not match every guide that repeats it. Because the number is unsettled and precision here would be false, our valley-wide history essay describes “walls of carved and gilded oak panels” and cites no count, pending a check against the operator’s current figure.
Attributions no one can pin down
The Très Riches Heures: who painted the Saumur page?
Château de Saumur appears in the September miniature of the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, one of the most famous illuminated manuscripts in the world. The painter of that particular leaf is genuinely unsettled: the Limbourg brothers, Barthélemy d’Eyck working in the 1440s, and Jean Colombe who completed the manuscript in the 1480s have all been proposed. We attribute the manuscript at the level scholarship allows (made for Jean de Berry, begun by the Limbourgs 1412 to 1416, completed by Colombe 1485 to 1489, now Musée Condé, Chantilly, MS 65) and we name no painter for the September page itself.
Loches: who carved the effigy of Agnès Sorel?
At Loches, the recumbent effigy of Agnès Sorel is dated to the fifteenth century by the French national heritage inventory, which names no sculptor. Scholarship has proposed both Jean Colombe’s circle and others, and the attribution remains debated. We describe it as “a fifteenth-century recumbent effigy, its sculptor still debated,” and name no candidate as fact.
Chambord: who designed it?
The Domaine national de Chambord says two things on the same page, and both are true. It reads the double staircase, the centre-plan keep and the terrace drainage as evidence of Leonardo da Vinci’s hand behind François I’s project. It also states plainly that the architect’s identity “has remained an enigma”, and that no plan and no text contemporary with the building gives a name. It even supplies the reason for the silence: the site’s records were dispersed or destroyed at the end of the eighteenth century.
Names circulate anyway, Domenico da Cortona and Pierre Nepveu among them, and none of them is established. Our guide and our film report the attribution and the absence side by side, and assert no architect. A five-hundred-year-old building that half of Europe has photographed has no documented author, and that absence is a finding rather than a gap waiting for a confident answer.
Les Fâcheux: who wrote the music?
Molière’s Les Fâcheux, the first comédie-ballet, was premiered at Vaux-le-Vicomte during Fouquet’s fête on 17 August 1661. Who composed it is not agreed. The Vaux-le-Vicomte estate says the play was “created in collaboration with choreographer Beauchamp and composer Lully”. The Philharmonie de Paris, writing about the genre, says Pierre Beauchamp composed the bulk of the score and that Lully contributed a single piece, the courante for Lysandre.
Neither is a careless source, and the disagreement is about emphasis as much as fact: Lully’s name carries the work in catalogue shorthand, while the detailed account of the score credits Beauchamp. We went back and forth on this one and landed on naming both men and their roles without adjudicating the score, because the hub block is 200 words and this needs more room than that. If you can settle it from a seventeenth-century source, we would like to hear from you.
Hohenschwangau: who built the castle of 1538, and how is his name spelled?
Two Bavarian state records describe the same campaign of 1538 to 1547 and name its builder differently. Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte writes Lucio de Spari and calls him Neapolitan, offering the Castel Nuovo as a probable model for the box-like residential block he raised. The Bavarian heritage office, in its statutory listing, writes Lucio di Spazzi and gives no birthplace at all. Circulating accounts add a third version, making him a Lombard from Lanzo d’Intelvi with a spell at the Innsbruck Hofburg, and that one has no state carrier behind it.
So our guide names the man, attributes the Neapolitan origin to the institution that asserts it rather than to itself, prints both spellings beside the record that uses each, and states no birthplace of its own. The Innsbruck claim we leave out entirely: an unsourced detail repeated often enough still has nothing under it.
When a source contradicts itself
Burg Eltz: eighty rooms or more than a hundred?
The same operator contradicts itself across languages. The German pages of burg-eltz.de give the castle up to eighty rooms; the English pages of the same site say more than a hundred. That gap is the likely origin of the figures that circulate elsewhere. Twelve rooms are shown on the guided tour, which is the number a visitor can actually check, so that is the one our guide leads with, and we report the discrepancy rather than choosing a side.
Burg Eltz: is the Banner Hall of 1470 or about 1480?
A third self-contradiction on the same site. The building chronology on burg-eltz.de dates the Fahnensaal, the Banner Hall with its late-Gothic net vault, to 1470; the guided-tour description on the same site calls it the Banner Hall of around 1480. Nothing we could find settles which, and the difference is not one a visitor can see, so our guide gives the range rather than picking the page we happened to read first.
Burg Eltz: 1835 or 1838 for the Diezler view?
The most interesting conflicts are the ones a source has with itself. On the official Burg Eltz website, the page describing Anton Diezler’s painting of the castle gives two different years: the image filename says 1835, while the caption text beside it says 1838. We ship 1838, the operator’s considered caption value, and we do not “correct” it to 1835, because chasing the filename would only be chasing a different guess. It stays logged as an open question that a third source would settle.
When the specialists overrule the operator
Burg Eltz: was the first cannon north of the Alps fired here?
Burg Eltz states in its own history that the first secured cannon attack north of the Alps took place at the castle in 1331, during the siege by Archbishop Balduin of Trier. The claim rests on a group of gun-arrows, partly of wood, long kept at the castle. When Olaf Wagener and Achim Schmidt published their building-archaeological study of the siege castle in the Trierer Zeitschrift in 2010 and 2011, they examined that evidence and concluded it cannot carry the claim: none of the arrows was recovered during the clearance of the west zwinger where they were said to have been found, they were already at the castle by the early twentieth century with their origin unrecorded, one is a modern replica made by a former castellan, and a nineteenth-century purchase cannot be ruled out. Their verdict is that the finds should not be cited as evidence at all.
This is the hardest kind of conflict for us, because the operator is normally our best source for its own castle, and here the peer-reviewed specialists contradict it. We follow the specialists: our Eltz guide reports the castle’s claim, reports the study, and declines the superlative. We would rather lose a striking fact than repeat one the evidence will not support.
Burg Eltz: has one family really held it since 1157?
Burg Eltz is famous for an unbroken line of family ownership, and three institutions state it plainly. The castle’s own history says the building is today in the hands of the 34th generation of the lords and counts of and at Eltz, without interruption since the middle of the twelfth century. Rhineland-Palatinate’s Generaldirektion Kulturelles Erbe describes furnishings in which more than eight centuries of continuity of the counts at Eltz as owners are reflected. The Deutsche Burgenvereinigung, awarding the family its Grosser Denkmalpreis in 2024, says the castle is already in the 34th generation of family ownership.
Alexander Thon, writing on the Rhineland regional-history portal of the Landschaftsverband Rheinland, qualifies what that continuity can be shown to mean at its earliest end. On his account Eltz was an imperial castle for close to two centuries after its first appearance in the records, garrisoned by unfree imperial ministerials who bore the name Eltz from the place of their service rather than as a family name in the modern sense, and a non-noble Eltz ministerial line is demonstrable only from 1268, at which point it appears to have received Eltz from the Roman-German kings as a hereditary fief.
The two accounts are not in fact describing the same thing. Neither has the rock changing hands; the disagreement is about what the surviving charters can be made to prove about the men who held it before 1268, and about whether a name taken from an office is the same as a family name. We give both. Our Eltz guide opens on the continuity as its thesis, attributes the dated version to the bodies that make it, and sets Thon’s qualification beside it in the history section. The opening sentence is deliberately the one place the claim still stands in our own voice.
Burg Eltz: how far away was the siege castle?
Trutzeltz, the siege castle Archbishop Balduin of Trier raised above Burg Eltz during the Eltz Feud, sits on the ridge to the north, and the distance between the two is given differently by our two best sources. The KuLaDig regional heritage register places it about 170 meters north of the approach to Burg Eltz, a figure it takes from a 2006 study by Eulenstein. Olaf Wagener and Achim Schmidt, in the building-archaeological survey of the siege works published in the Trierer Zeitschrift, put the distance of the two fortifications from the besieged castle at between 200 and 240 meters.
The gap is large enough to matter for anyone trying to picture the siege, and neither figure can be dismissed. It may not be a disagreement at all: KuLaDig measures 170 meters north of the castle’s approach, while Wagener and Schmidt measure from the besieged castle itself, so the two are counting from different points. We print no horizontal distance in the Eltz guide’s own prose, carry both figures with their datums in the source note, and record the divergence here. The height does not settle it either. Wagener and Schmidt measure just under forty meters from platform to platform, while KuLaDig puts Burg Eltz at 129 and Trutzeltz at 182 meters above sea level and calls the difference around fifty. Our guide prints the scholarly platform figure, because a height derived by subtracting two sea-level readings is the wrong datum for how far one castle rises above another.
Vaux-le-Vicomte: was Le Nôtre “Premier Jardinier du Roi”?
The Vaux-le-Vicomte estate’s account of André Le Nôtre says he was “later named Premier Jardinier du Roi”. At Versailles, which holds the deeper record of his career, he is recorded in royal service from 1635 and head gardener of the Tuileries from 1637, and gives 1657 for the controller-generalship of the king’s buildings. The specific title the Vaux page uses is one the scholarship does not record him holding at all.
The difference matters because it changes the story. If Le Nôtre was unknown before Vaux, Louis XIV discovered him there; if he had held royal appointments for two decades, Fouquet hired established men and the king took the team. We follow the specialists and avoid the title: our pages say Vaux was the first project on which Le Vau, Le Nôtre and Le Brun worked together, which is what the Vaux estate itself says and what the record supports.
Questions the evidence cannot settle
Some conflicts are not between two sources but inside the evidence itself. These are the cases where we decline to give an answer, and say so on the page rather than pick the tidier version.
Ludwig II of Bavaria: how did he die?
On 13 June 1886, the day after he was taken into custody at Neuschwanstein and interned at Berg, Ludwig II was found dead in Lake Starnberg together with the psychiatrist von Gudden. The Bavarian Palace Administration, the operator of his palaces, does not offer a cause: its own account says he died in mysterious circumstances.
The medical literature is still arguing. Steinberg and Falkai reopened the case in the European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience in 2020, and their reading is contested by other specialists. Drowning, a struggle, a heart attack and a shooting have all been argued from the same thin evidence, and no autopsy settles it.
So our guide and our film state what is documented and stop. That is less satisfying than a conclusion, and it is the honest position: where the specialists have not settled a question, we are not going to settle it for them.
Hohenschwangau: what was the round tower of 1363?
A round tower recorded in 1363 as the Synweln Turm stood on this site before the castle the heritage register first mentions in 1397, and two Bavarian state institutions read the same documents and arrive at different buildings. The castle database of Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte, written by the archaeologist Joachim Zeune, makes that tower the direct predecessor of today’s palace, appearing from 1476 as Burg Schwanstain, and describes Hohenschwangau as built towards the middle of the fourteenth century as a round residential tower. The Historisches Lexikon Bayerns instead lists Schwanstein and the round Scheiblingsturm as two separate castles among the family’s six.
A state institution’s castle specialist against the state library’s encyclopedia is not a case of one good source and one bad one, and neither publishes the reasoning that would let a reader choose. Our guide reports both readings with both institutions named. Worth noting in passing that sinwel is Middle High German for round, so the tower’s two recorded names both mean round tower and neither of them says what it was for.
The Schwangau swan: black or silver?
The arms that gave both castles in this valley their names disagree with themselves across six centuries. In the Codex Manesse, the Grosse Heidelberger Liederhandschrift, the minnesinger Hiltbold von Schwangau with a black swan on a red field. The official blazon, adopted as the municipality’s arms in 1953, gives a silver swan armed black with wings spread, on red.
Two credible records, two tinctures, and the older witness is the manuscript rather than the modern blazon. This is not a case where one supersedes the other: a medieval song manuscript and a twentieth-century municipal grant are different kinds of document doing different jobs. Our guide gives both and says which is older, and its captions describe the swan without committing to a colour the sources divide on.
Found something we got wrong?
If you can settle one of these with a primary source, or you have spotted an error anywhere else on the site, we genuinely want to hear it. Write to info@stonekeepatlas.com or use the contact page, and point us at the source if you have one. Corrections are made to the article itself, and the more interesting conflicts end up here.