Desloch is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Bad Kreuznach district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Meisenheim, whose seat is in the like-named town. Desloch is a farming and winegrowing village.
Desloch is a linear village (by some definitions, a “thorpe”) lying 3 km northwest of Meisenheim on the Glan at the north edge of the North Palatine Uplands. The municipal area measures 637 ha, of which 129 ha is wooded. Desloch lies on an old Roman road between the Nahe and the Glan.
Clockwise from the north, Desloch's neighbours are the municipality of Lauschied, the municipality of Abtweiler (at a single point only), the municipality of Raumbach, the town of Meisenheim, the municipality of Breitenheim and the municipality of Jeckenbach.
Also belonging to Desloch is the outlying homestead of Neuwieser Hof.
The village's name is of Celtic origin, meaning “pool at the mountain”. As long ago as 400 BC, Celts were living on the heights around what is now Desloch. Over the centuries that followed, these Celts were supplanted by Germanic peoples who thrust their way from the Rhine’s right bank into the lands on the left bank only sporadically. From 50 BC to AD 450 – fully 500 years – the Romans held sway in the region, for a time even under Emperor Augustus. With the onset of the Migration Period and Rome’s downfall, the Romans vanished from the land. For a short time, Germanic tribes dwelt in the region before having to give way to the Franks, who founded new villages and farms, worked very hard, and were the lords at all the estates. It was in Frankish times, the time of the widespread woodland clearing, that the name Desloch – earlier called Tageslach, and then Denslach – arose. In 1184, Desloch had its first documentary mention. It had its beginnings in a monastic complex that was a branch of Disibodenberg Abbey. Desloch was in the Early Middle Ages the seat of a high court of the Waldgraves and the Counts Palatine.