Schloss Gitting

Schloss Gitting stood near the village of Niederleierndorf in Lower Bavaria, on a slight rise called the Schlossbuckel between two branches of the Große Laaber and the Alte Laber rivers. The site was first fortified in the late 12th or mid-13th century by the Gittinger family, local nobles whose name appears in records from 1187 onwards. Their successors sold the estate in 1371, and after destruction in the Löwlerkrieg of 1490 it was rebuilt in 1589 by Hans Ulrich von Königsfeld. A copperplate by Michael Wening from the early 18th century shows a multi-part water castle with two domed corner towers and two arched gateways leading over a bridge. The castle complex measured about sixty by seventy metres and was surrounded by a fifteen-metre-wide moat fed from the rivers. A baroque park lay outside the water defences, and the main building was reached from the east. The site survived the Thirty Years War but was repaired again between 1705 and 1720 by Christoph Cajetan Ferdinand Nothaft von Weißenstein. By 1815 the moat had largely silted up, and the buildings themselves vanished in the 19th century. Today nothing of the castle remains above ground except the former steward’s house on Wiesenweg 1. The northern arm of the moat survives as a fishpond, while the other three sides appear as shallow depressions in farmland. A protected fen lies adjacent to the south, and a drainage channel once led from the south-eastern corner towards the Alte Laaber. The whole area is still marked on official maps as a medieval site, offering a quiet reminder of the vanished water castle.