However Matzen was always an Allodial title or freehold property and at no time a temporal or church fief so it does no appear in records of land tenure.

The nearby Reith Parish church registers record successive guardians of the castle; in 1428 Hans Grysinger, in 1421 Gastl Gesind and in 1451 Eckhart Gesinden.

who undertook a major reconstruction of the castle and also acquired the Matzener Crucifix, an important work of early German woodcarving, previously attributed to Veit Stoss.

[12] Eventually the roof fell in and by the end of their occupation the upper part of the castle was uninhabitable and the last von Pfeiffersberg Ritter, Joseph, lived in a few ramshackle rooms in the lower "Gut Matzen" area.

In September 1873 the castle was sold by Josef von Pfeiffersbergs to Frances Margaret ("Fanny") Grohman (1831-1908), daughter of Captain James Read of Mount Heaton Roscrea, in Ireland, a cousin of the first Duke of Wellington, she had married in 1848 an Austrian landowner Adolf Rheinhold Grohmann of Schloss Wolfgang in the Salzkammergut.

After her husband's death in 1877 she married Oberst Ludwig Reichsritter Schnorr von und zu Caroldsfeld-Brunnlassperg, formerly of the Kaiser Jaeger Regiment.

She undertook a major program of restoration of the castle which was then in a derelict state, adding the internal gallery bridges, reroofing the main building, and creating the living quarters largely as they now exist.

[17] On the outbreak of the 1914-18 war Baillie Grohman and his wife, as British Nationals were refused permission to leave or go beyond the vicinity of the castle, but after the intervention of Prince Auersberg and other friends they eventually were allowed to depart for England.

Florence subsequently used the remaining supplies left over from the Relief fund to establish the Tyrolean Children's Welfare Association to continue providing assistance to the hard-pressed Tyrolese, an organisation taken over and expanded by the Austrian Government in 1926.

During the second world war the castle was requisitioned because of its foreign ownership and was used to store historic artifacts from the Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum and the University Library in Innsbruck.

In the later stages of the war another of Fanny von Carolsfeld's grandsons, Kurt Adolph von Schmedes, who had been bombed out of his house in Vienna and was living in the castle, negotiated the peaceful surrender of the Castle to the advancing American forces and established its status as property of Allied citizens, helping to protect it from further deprivations.

Mr Kump undertook extensive works to repair the castle walls and fabric and installed oil central heating.

Originally a steep covered passageway led up from the valley floor to the courtyard, where part of the lower "Gut Matzen" block now stands.

The interior includes a Gothic chapel with a baroque altar, and a barrel-vaulted Knight's Hall with a large fireplace in the North East corner.

There are several chamfered Late Gothic door frames in Haguaer marble that were salvaged by Fanny von Carolsfeld from the earlier building.

The castle formerly contained a celebrated crucifix, previously thought to be by Veit Stoss but now attributed to the Danube school.

Von Lipperheide instead built his own "Neumatzen" villa and laid out a park with ornamental lake flanked by stone lions, elaborate fake Roman ruins.