AT A GLANCE
Why go?
Pulkov Castle is the rediscovered footprint of a small medieval hillfort tucked into the forest above the Rokytná river valley in the Vysočina region of the Czech Republic. Rather than a standing ruin, the site is a protected archaeological landmark where earthworks and a few traces of masonry still read across the ground—quiet, atmospheric, and free to explore.↗
Lost to memory until 1985 and named only after the nearby hamlet of Pulkov, the fort sits on a low rocky spur overlooking the river. Visitors come for the sense of discovery: walking the ramparts, picking out the defensive ditch, and enjoying the woodland valley setting inside the Rokytná Nature Park.↗↗
A castle the map forgot
For centuries Pulkov carried no name at all. No charters, chronicles or lordship records mention it, and when the wooded hillside above the Rokytná was surveyed in 1985—by researcher Josef Unger—what emerged was not a crumbling tower but a clean outline cut into the earth: a fortified plateau that had quietly survived beneath the trees. Because there was no historical record to recover, the site simply took its modern label from the village of Pulkov, about a kilometre to the south-east, and its true medieval identity remains a puzzle. Researchers have wondered whether it might be one of the vanished settlements recorded in old documents—Urbanice, Dalibořice, or Holawich, held by the Znojmo provost in 1252—but nothing is confirmed.
