Burgstall Welden

The medieval Burgstall Welden stands on the Theklaberg above the market town of Welden in Swabia. Only earthworks and ditches remain of the former ministerial castle built by a service family of the Margraves of Burgau. The Bavarian State Office for Monument Protection lists it as a medieval site. The Welden lords first appear in records in 1126 and gained the high and low jurisdictions in 1402. Between 1484 and 1747 thirteen executions took place here, including three women burned as witches. The family rose to positions such as hereditary cup-bearer of Augsburg but by 1596 had to sell the estate to the Fugger family. After the Thirty Years War the castle was dismantled, its stones reused for a brewery and later the Votivkirche. Visitors walk up a stepped path that follows the old castle approach cut into the hillside. The roughly rectangular main castle platform, about thirty by twenty metres, is surrounded by a broad U-shaped ditch up to eight and a half metres deep. No above-ground masonry survives, though the former bergfried probably stood in the north-east corner. The hilltop offers wide views over the Laugnatal valley and the modern water tower nearby.