Burgruine Haibach

The castle ruin Burgruine Haibach stands on the Hofberg, a hill in the Bavarian municipality of Haibach. Its story begins in the Middle Ages with the Haybecken family, who served the Counts of Bogen as ministeriales. Wirnto von Haybach and Dietrich Haibeck appear in the earliest records, which reach back to around 1100. Members of the family took part in building Regensburg Cathedral and in the Fifth Crusade.

A print by Michael Wening shows what the castle looked like: three storeys of stone, a hipped roof and a grand portal. A low wall and a baroque garden surrounded it. When the line died out in the late fifteenth century, the castle went to the Notthafft, Ossinger and Leoprechtinger families. Swedish troops destroyed it during the Thirty Years' War. In the early nineteenth century the site passed to the Bavarian state, then to a local farmer, and decay set in fast. A local association came together in the late twentieth century to preserve the ruins, and significant restoration work reached completion by 1990.

You can still see the castle walls and part of an early eighteenth-century residential building. In the former stable building, a museum now traces the area's past and the families who lived here. From Wirnto von Haybach to that museum, the Hofberg carries roughly nine hundred years of history.