Ruine Weissenberg

The ruins of Weissenberg stand once on a terrace on the eastern slope of the Weißenberg, a wooded hill between the Kollnitzberg and the Weißenberg in the Lower Austrian village of Münichreith-Laimbach. Built towards the end of the 12th century, the castle controlled the lands of Laimbach-Münichreith and Marbach. By the 13th century it belonged to the Weissenberg family, whose name first appears in a 1268 charter from Pöchlarn. After the family died out the castle fell into disuse and was attached to the nearby Mollenburg estate. In 1560 Samson Präzl restored the castle, installing a water pipe and adding an inn with a garden. He turned it into the centre of a large estate with a law court that now included the market town of Marbach on the Danube, the Kollnitz forest office with its woods on the Ostrong, and the villages of Münichreith and Laimbach. By the 17th century the castle had decayed again, and in 1675 it was described as largely ruinous and uninhabitable. In 1678 the Starhemberg counts took over the estate, moved the administration to Marbach, and left the castle to crumble further. Today only a few stretches of wall remain on the terrace. A ground plan drawn in 1971 by Gerhard Seebach shows a three-storey square tower with walls about 65 to 80 centimetres thick, but the visible remains do not match this design. The surviving masonry on the north-west side suggests a smaller, low building rather than a tall keep. Scattered rubble and faint traces hint at a five-sided courtyard about two metres lower than the terrace, while the name Weissenberg may refer either to the bright hilltop or to a once-whitewashed castle.