Cultural heritage D-2-7444-0124 in Aidenbach

A medieval stronghold once stood in the small hamlet of Gunzing, part of the market town of Aidenbach in Lower Bavaria. It lay just west of the vanished village church of St Georg, which may have served the local nobility, and 250 metres west of the Aldersbach stream. Archaeologists recognise the site as a medieval and early modern settlement with traces of a high-medieval noble residence that later became a small castle. The place first appears in records around 1100, when it belonged to the Haidenburg lordship. By 1247 a local knight called Eckericus de Gincingin is named in an Aldersbach charter. The castle passed through several noble families—the Gunzingers, the Auers, the Dürnhartsteins—before becoming a freehold of Ortenburg in the 18th century. In 1746 it was granted as a fief to Ignatz Michael Freiherr von Schreckleb, and by 1780 Reichsfreiherr Josef Anton von Gugler held the manor. A copperplate view by Michael Wening shows a two-storey building with a low hip roof and four small corner watch-towers. A moat surrounded the castle, crossed by a bridge from the church side, and outside the ditch a palisade fence ran round the grounds. The castle itself stood until about 1830, when it was demolished and its site built over in the 19th century. The vanished church of St Georg likewise disappeared beneath later construction, leaving only buried foundations to mark the vanished stronghold.