The outcrop at the foot of the Schlossberg 100 m north of Ziegenrück in the Saale valley provides a famous insight into the tectonic structure of the Thuringian Slate Mountains. The Lower Carboniferous rocks (clay slate, greywacke) found here were deposited around 335 million years ago and were narrowed, slated and laid into large fold structures just a few million years later by the Variscan mountain formation. The saddle exposed here, which is around 30 m wide and strikes east-northeast, has a flat northwestern and an almost vertically dipping southeastern limb.