Motte Witzleshofen

The Motte Witzleshofen stands in the centre of Witzleshofen, a village near Gefrees in Upper Franconia. It was a small medieval earthwork castle built on a low mound beside the Rieglersbach stream. The site now lies beneath modern houses, but a short stretch of the original mound survives as a low earth wall. No written records survive for the castle itself, though the village appears in documents from 1363. A house and courtyard are mentioned in 1509, held by the Wallenrod family as part of their estate at Alte Kemnat. Church books from Streitau refer in 1601 to a ‘Schlosse Witzleshofen’, suggesting the site was still recognised as a small fortified place. Visitors can walk to the surviving earthwork in the village square and see the faint line of the ring ditch around the mound. The Bavarian monument authority lists the site as a protected archaeological feature. Old land-survey maps allow experts to reconstruct a central mound about twenty metres wide surrounded by a shallow ditch roughly fifty metres across.