Burg Fischhausen

Burg Fischhausen stands beside the L810 road between Hooksiel and Horumersiel in Wangerland, a flat marshland parish in Friesland. The site began as a small stronghold built around 1400 by Matthias von Fischhausen, later becoming the seat of his namesake chieftain family. In 1511 Häuptling Ricklef von Vischhusen took control of the Jeverland for Edo Wiemkens’s daughters and raised a new stone house on the old bailey. His grandson Boing added a two-storey residential wing with an octagonal stair-tower in 1578. By 1689 Lüdeke von Weltzien had bought the place and removed part of the older structure, shortening it to two floors. The castle is surrounded by a double moat up to 180 metres long and 160 metres wide, with arms about twelve metres across and an inner bank still standing 1.5 metres high. On the north and west sides the ditch is partly filled with rubble. Two sandstone portals grace the main entrances, and above the tower door the Fishhouse coat of arms bears the date 1578. Once fourteen marsh farms belonged to the estate; today the castle remains in private hands and is not open to the public. Beyond the moats the surrounding land became a nature reserve in 1980. Visitors can walk the outer ramparts and look across the wide, flat meadows that once formed part of the estate. The old farm buildings still stand within the inner enclosure, silent witnesses to the castle’s long agricultural past.