The castle ruins in Gamla Höjentorp dates back to the 13th century. The castle is said to have been donated to the bishop of Skara in 1284, but was then returned to the crown at the time of Gustav Vasa’s reformation. At the middle of the 17th century, Queen Kristina gave the castle as a wedding gift to Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie’s wife, Maria Eufrosyne. In 1722 the castle burnt down and it is said that Queen Ulrika Eleonora was visiting at the time. She watched the fire from a nearby hill, which was then named after this Drottningkullen (the Queen Hill).
Today only the ruins of the basement remain of the original castle, but the place bears witness of the importance of this area in the Middle Ages, which was also when Skara had its period of greatness. In the overgrown castle garden are beautiful ashes and lime-trees and in the slope down towards the Garden Lake it smells of ramsons and other rare plants.
References:The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.