Curious onlookers, kept at a safe distance, sat in their cars sheltering from the rain apprehensively surveying Turaida Castle and the swathes of hillside that have given way beneath it to form disheveled mounds of earth and uprooted trees.
"We often come to folklore festivals here, to dance and listen to music. There aren't many castles in Latvia and this is the most popular," said Inese, owner of a nearby summer cottage, who with her husband and small son had managed to get past the approach road, which is blocked with debris.
Perched high above the Gauja River, Turaida, or "God's garden" in the language of the Livs - the region's first settlers - is one of the most spectacular castles in the Baltic states.
Located in a picturesque national park of small hills and forests about 50 kilometers from the Latvian capital Riga, the castle attracts some 140,000 visitors each year.
Quite how close the castle is to collapse is uncertain.
"The situation is very serious but not critical," said Juris Civs, deputy mayor of the nearby town of Sigulda.
Others are more worried. After a third mud slide in as many nights, tempers were fraying at the weekend among members of an expert group formed to avert total collapse, said Maris Seglins, chief geologist at the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Regional Development.
"We've had sharp discussions and failed to come up with any solutions. We don't have any experience of how to deal with this and want advice on how to stabilize the hill from Western experts who know about the latest technology," said Seglins.
Warm temperatures have caused the snow and ice, built up since last October, to melt. Sections of the castle mound are saturated from underground water sources that feed the castle's well.
Drainage work and monitoring of the hill is now taking place, paid for by an interim 10,000 lat ($15,600) grant from the Ministry of Culture.
Stepping over fresh cracks that have appeared in the ground a few meters from the castle foundations, Anna Jurkane, director of the castle museum for the last 30 years, says she has had little sleep since the mud slides began on Feb. 6.
"The foundations themselves are built on sandstone, which we hope will hold, but we haven't faced such a complex problem in Latvia before, and we don't know the weight of the building."
The red-brick structure has come to grief many times since 1214, when construction began under Bishop Albert von Buxhoevden, who founded Riga in 1201, and whose crusading Knights of the Order tried to subjugate the pagan Baltic population.
A lightning strike set off its store of gunpowder in the 18th century, and parts of the building have collapsed from time to time.
Minor mud slides have occurred before, but nothing on this scale, said Jurkane.
"This castle is like a living person. It was built and inhabited by people from other countries and is not part of my culture. But it is part of the life of our nation," she said.
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