Burg Oflings

Burg Oflings stands beside a small stream on the edge of the hamlet of Oflings, a part of Deuchelried near Wangen in the Allgäu. It is a motte castle, built around the year 1200 as a tower stronghold for the Abbey of St. Gallen. The Hüss von Wolflins family held it as a fief from 1340, and later it passed to the imperial city of Wangen before the Sigg family took possession in 1897. The castle’s main feature is a square stone tower rising seventeen metres high on a thirty-five-centimetre mound thirty-five metres across. The ground floor walls are two metres thick, and above them an overhanging timber upper storey dates from the late Middle Ages. After a thorough restoration in 1996 the site received the Denkmalschutzpreis, though it remains in private hands and is not open to visitors inside. Visitors can walk around the base of the mound and view the tower from outside. The surrounding fields and the stream add to the quiet, rural setting. The small scale and clear lines of the castle show how such fortified homes were organised centuries ago.