Burgstall Dasing

Burgstall Dasing, located in the municipality of Dasing in Germany, was established by medieval Bavarian nobility.

The site was founded around the middle of the 1200s under Arnold I. von Massenhausen, a follower of Duke Ludwig II the Strict. During the 1300s the place appears in documents by name: an Ortlieb von Taesingen is recorded in 1334, and in 1352 five sons of the family endowed a chaplaincy for the castle chapel. By the turn of the 15th century Friedrich Massenhauser von Dasing and his cousin Wilhelm are attested (1397 and 1400) as the last members of that branch.

After the family line ended, the lordship passed through inheritance to Arnold Ebran von Wildenberg, who was married to Elisabeth I. von Massenhausen. In 1424 the daughters of Arnold VI. sold their shares, representing half the castle, to Hans Fraunberger zu Massenhausen. Fraunberger no longer lived at the site but appointed a steward to manage it. The castle’s knightly vassals included the Kärpf (or Kerpf) von Dasing, a minor noble family whose coat of arms showed a carp.

Throughout the 1400s and into the early 1500s ownership changed frequently, with recorded transactions involving the Prüschenk brothers, Johannes von Gegenberg, Marquard von Schellenberg, Jörg Pienzenauer, Sigmund and Heinrich Prüschenk, among others. By the early 1500s Count Heinrich von Hardegg held the lordship and sold it to Georg Ilsung; it later passed to Philipp Adler and then to Wolf II. von Weichs zu Griesbach, who from 1518 used the title “zu Dasing.”

In 1632 during the Thirty Years’ War the Weichs family seat at Dasing was destroyed by Swedish troops. The guardians of the heiress Eva Maria von Weichs sold the manor in 1644 to Abbot Ulrich Hertfelder of the imperial abbey St. Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg for 19,000 Rhenish gulden plus 400 gulden as a purchase fee. That sale was fully paid and receipted in 1656, and the abbey retained the Hofmark Dasing until secularization.

Around 1701 a plate by Michael Wening showed a planned palace at the site, and an abbot, Willibald Popp, projected a new building that was never carried out. The ground floor of the former main residential building later served as a gardener’s house. In 1877 that gardener’s house was bought by the neighbouring Hofbauer, and over time stones were taken from the ruin for reuse in local buildings, leaving principally the masonry cellar of the principal building. A small house known as the Jägergütl on the former outer bailey was bought in 1889, burned and was demolished in 1938; at that time the interior of the outer bailey was levelled and the castle well, about thirty-eight metres deep, was filled. An information board was placed at the preserved cellar vault for Open Monument Day in 2005, and the municipality later erected a wooden protective roof over the cellar entrance. The site is recorded as a medieval ground monument (a Burgstall) under monument number D-7-7632-0003.