Dhe small towers are lined up at the foot of the wall, and Patric Heintz has to walk a few meters down the slope before he stands in front of them. Judging by the look on his face, he would now like to kick her over. Wouldn’t make things any better though. Instead, he begins to remove and replace stone by stone. On this gigantic wall that looks from down here as if it reaches up to the sky.
Two and a half millennia ago, the people we now call the Celts built the bulwark to protect their settlement behind it. And two and a half days ago, hikers took stones out of this wall to stack them up into small towers – it mightn’t have been longer, the national park ranger regularly checks the ring wall near Otzenhausen. Children? Oh, you might look at them. “But it is almost always adults who build such towers. We can put up as many signs as we like. Selfies are more important.” Heintz puts the last stones back up into the wall, in gaps that they may or may not have left, the original architecture being forgiving of minor mistakes, he says. “It stood there untouched for two and a half millennia. But Instagram didn’t exist then either.”
The flora in the country’s youngest national park is only slowly beginning to become wild and untamed once more.
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Image: Stefan Nink
The ring wall of Otzenhausen is one of the oldest buildings in Germany – and a central place in the youngest national park of the republic. The Hunsrück-Hochwald National Park has existed for a good six years now. The vast majority of the total area of 100 square kilometers is in Rhineland-Palatinate, a small part in Saarland. Just like the Wall. Anyone who went to school within a radius of 50 or 60 kilometers used to be dragged here on hiking day, to the Ring of the Huns, as they used to say for a long time. “Celtic culture was more associated with countries like Ireland,” says Heintz. “The fact that we also have a Celtic heritage here – that was neglected for a long time. Although it’s actually hard to miss.” The wall is two and a half kilometers long, 40 meters wide and ten high. Someone calculated that the equivalent of 3,000 single-family homes might be built with its stones.
The jungle of tomorrow
And the forest begins right behind the wall, and that’s what this national park is all regarding. You want to protect it. You don’t want to – no: just don’t cherish and care for it. Just leave it alone. And preserve it for the generations that might otherwise not be able to discover as much forest. “Welcome to the jungle of tomorrow!” is the motto of the protected area, and how quickly the gradual transition from managed forest to wilderness is taking place can already be observed. On the hiking trail from Ringwall towards Neuhütten, for example, it looks as if a disgruntled Godzilla was on the move last weekend. Trees uprooted everywhere, branches as thick as legs criss-cross the path, torn-off treetops block the view. In some places you have to make a wide arc through the thicket, because otherwise you would have to climb tree roots over two meters high.
