Burg Wittelsbach

The castle occupied a long, crescent-shaped crest, extending to about 200 metres in total length with a central defended area roughly 115 metres across in one account. The built area narrows and widens along this curve, reaching widths of roughly 50 metres and opening out to roughly 90 metres where the forecourt lay. The central part of the site drops steeply, by around 20 metres, down into the valley below. Descriptions differ about the plan’s orientation, some placing the main castle on the eastern side with the outer ward to the west, while others describe the main length to the west with two outer wards to the east.

The defended complex used a mix of earth and stone. Earthen ramparts and ditches formed the basic outer works, including a neck ditch or half-moat protecting the approach and a further double ditch on the south side, and an inner and outer arrangement of baileys separated the core from the forecourt. Traces of these banks and trenches remain visible in places, although many of the earthworks have been levelled or built over as the site changed use.

A substantial stone curtain wall once enclosed the inner area. It was constructed from locally quarried sandstone blocks and boulders and measured about one and a half metres in thickness. Excavations revealed courses of masonry exposed in several sectors, with short stretches standing to about 1.7 metres high and one area showing some twenty courses to a height near 3.20 metres. Wall fragments and foundation remains uncovered during the 1978 to 1980 work were consolidated and in places completed with modern brick infill; the visible stone courses today reflect both medieval masonry and those later stabilizing interventions.

Close to the main area and built on top of the filled neck ditch is a late Gothic brick chapel with a single nave, an inset choir, and a tower beneath a saddle roof. Its west front and window tracery were altered in the nineteenth century. The chapel survives in situ and records the site’s continued religious use from the fifteenth century onward.

A circular brick cistern was uncovered in front of the church. Its draw-shaft descends to a floor about six metres below the present ground level and the cistern floor was paved with fragments of millstones. A receiving channel attached to the cistern was found filled with stone rubble, and the cistern appears to have been used as a refuse pit shortly before the place was finally abandoned.

A tall nineteenth-century national monument in a neo-Gothic style stands on the hill above the northern outlet of the former neck ditch. It is pinnacled in appearance and bears an inscription dedicating the memorial from Bavaria to its thousand-year ruling house. The monument was set in place in 1834 and remains a prominent modern feature on the site.

Throughout the interior of the former castle many earthworks and the internal forecourt walls and ditches have been largely levelled and incorporated into later uses. Agricultural buildings and a nineteenth-century benefice house occupy parts of the former enclosure, and the modern road towards Aichach follows the line of the old approach ditch. The 1978 to 1980 excavations consolidated selected foundations and partially rebuilt structural lengths so the earlier layout could be read more clearly in the present day.