King wedge

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Lake in the Königskeil. The water emerged from a construction pit, with which clay and loam for the forest paths were won.

The Königskeil is an area in the municipality of Großheide in East Frisia . It got its name from its special shape. The municipality protrudes here in a wedge shape to the west. The part of the name Königs- indicates that it is a former fiscal, i.e. royal country. Peat was extracted on the site until 2013 . Parts of the area have been afforested since 1974. The resulting forest, today around 3.5 square kilometers, is completely part of the Berumerfehner - Meerhusener Moor nature reserve . It belongs to the Lower Saxony State Forests and is looked after by the Aurich Revierforsterei Meerhusen in the Neuchâtel Forestry Office.

history

With the reclamation edict of 1765, Friedrich II took possession of Ödländer, Heiden and Moore for himself. In a contract concluded in 1794, Friedrich Wilhelm II leased the moorland in the area of ​​today's Berumerfehn along with the wild ones ( New Low German wild "a piece of wild, desolate and uncultivated [or undeveloped] land") to the Norder Fehngesellschaft. A long legal battle broke out over the exact boundaries of this area, which ended in a settlement in 1875. The Prussian state had meanwhile given the controversial savages elsewhere, so that the Norder Fehngesellschaft received the 37,500 hectare Königskeil (East Frisian Platt: Königskiel ) as well as a nearby so-called enlargement area. The company had to sell this area in 1920 to the state, which then leased it to the arable farming company in Berlin for peat extraction. After the Second World War , the area became the property of the State of Lower Saxony .

The southern part has been afforested since 1974. No forest had previously stood on the fallow land after peat extraction. A regression to the bog was rejected because the peat layers for moss formation had largely been removed and the area had been drained for peat extraction. In some areas, birch , heather and willow had already spread there. The rest of the area was plowed through to a depth of about 2.20 meters in order to prepare the soil for the planned reforestation. The result was a mixture of bog and underlying sandy soil, on which common oak , winter linden , beech, larch and silver fir were planted. An excavation pit set up in the middle of the area supplied clay for the new forest paths. Today the resulting forest is around 3.5 square kilometers.

Aurich-Wiesmoor-Torfvertriebs GmbH was active in peat extraction in the northern area of ​​the Königskeil until 2013. All facilities were then dismantled. The excavation areas were rewetted and renatured to a residual peat thickness of at least 50 cm. In the meantime, peat moss has grown on many of the former mining areas.

literature

  • Silke Arends, Martin Stromann: Green Jewel. The community of Großheide can offer a lot of original landscape - however, the "Königskeil" is hardly known in the south. About the municipality in “Störtebekerland”, which is home to around 8,700 people. In: Ostfriesland Magazin , vol. 28, 2012, issue 5, pp. 14–31.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Berumerfehner Moor. In: Eternal Sea Route. Retrieved June 22, 2020 (German).
  2. ^ Collection of the East Frisian field names - Victorburer Wilde. Retrieved June 24, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Collection of East Frisian field names - Königskeil. Retrieved June 22, 2020 .

Coordinates: 53 ° 31 '  N , 7 ° 26'  E