Plattner Kunstgraben

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Plattner Kunstgraben
Horní Blatná Blatenský příkop.jpg
Data
location Czech Republic
River system Elbe
Drain over Breitenbach  → Schwarzwasser  → Zwickauer Mulde  → Mulde  → Elbe  → North Sea
origin Tee off at Boží Dar
50 ° 24 ′ 46 ″  N , 12 ° 54 ′ 7 ″  E
muzzle at Horní Blatná coordinates: 50 ° 23 ′ 44 ″  N , 12 ° 46 ′ 28 ″  E 50 ° 23 ′ 44 ″  N , 12 ° 46 ′ 28 ″  E

length 12.9 km

The Plattner Kunstgraben (also Plattner Graben , Erbwassergraben ; in Czech Blatenský příkop ) once supplied black water to the mines in the Platten mountain area ( Horní Blatná in the Czech Republic ) on the Plattenberg as impact water .

course

At a height of 975  m nm (at the now defunct Neumühle near Boží Dar ) the almost two meter wide ditch branches off from the black water. Then it leads around the Gottesgaber Moore, over the forester's houses ( Myslivny ), Seifen ( Ryžovna ), Irrgang ( Bludná ), Totenbach and the northern slope of the Plattenberg to Horní Blatná, where it flows into the Plattner or Breitenbach. The difference in altitude is a total of 127 meters.

history

The 12.85 km long artificial moat was created between 1540 and 1554 to bring water to Platten. The water requirements of the rapidly developing tin mines, soaps and stamping works could no longer be covered by the Plattner Bach and Breitenbach.

The builder was Stephan Lenk (Stefan Lenck). 1.5 to 2 m wide dams were planned on both sides for inspection walks and maintenance of the watercourse. To prevent snow drifts, both sides of the trench were densely planted with spruce trees. In addition, many sections were protected against freezing and snowing in with poles and spruce branches in winter . In many places, the water flow was regulated with dams, sluices , weirs and drainage channels. In the event of high water, part of each was drained back into the black water via the side troughs. Since the moat and its watercourse crossed numerous local streets and streams, several footbridges, bridges and runs were built, one of which has been preserved not far from Försterhäuser to this day. Some parts of the canal were lined with brick or lined with wood and covered with wood all year round. The Plattner city council therefore employed several supervisors who were supposed to conduct regular inspections along the trench and rectify any deficiencies.

The artificial moat near Horní Blatná

The Plattner Graben was of great economic importance. It supplied a large part of the Plattner mines, tin washes and ore mills with water and provided sufficient water for extinguishing fires. Its construction triggered a significant revival of mining on the Plattenberg, where numerous new pits were built. As early as 1541, 12 new stamping mills and numerous huts were built on the Graben .

In the past, the platters had numerous disputes with mine owners and tin washers from Gottesgab und Seifen about the water and the rights of use of the trench , especially in 1564 and 1615. The plumber city council complained to Prague and Vienna about the disruptive interventions by the neighbors . On June 1, 1570, he received a special decree from Maximilian II in Prague with which the monarch declared the protection of the moat and granted Platten the right of inheritance to levy water and malt fees forever and ever. This privilege was confirmed by King Matthias in 1613 . Still from the end of the 19th century there are still notes about repeated friction between Platten and the residents of Soap and the forester's houses , who secretly irrigated their meadows with ditch water. The numerous boundary stones that were set on both sides of the ditch bear witness to the efforts of the Blattner to precisely delimit the properties belonging to the ditch and to ensure that they are inviolable . The letter E is carved on this as the initial of the word Erbwassergraben . Some of these boundary stones date from around 1800.

The artificial moat near Horní Blatná

In the middle of the 19th century the trench completely lost its importance for mining. However, it was used extensively for industrial companies and retained its importance for fire protection. The moat was owned by the Wassergraben-Handelsgesellschaft, founded in Platten in 1872, whose chairman was always the mayor of the city of Platten. She secured her property through entries in the land registers, the individual shareholders paid contributions depending on the extent of the use from the moat. This type of ownership and management of the trench lasted essentially until 1945. The Wassergraben-Handelsgesellschaft took care of all necessary maintenance work and repairs. Extensive modern repairs were carried out in 1890 and 1920. After the last regulation in 1920, 25 bridges and overpasses, 12 weirs for floods, 1 water overpass and 40 gravel and sand traps were registered on the trench route.

In the past decades the Plattner Graben was an almost forgotten technical monument. Despite a renovation carried out in 1926-29, it was overgrown, silted up and in places devoured by the moor due to the cessation of mining. In 1980 the Plattner Graben was added to the state register of cultural monuments. The last renovation took place from 1995 to 2001, a reconstruction costing over 22 million crowns , whereby the water bed was secured with oak boards and spruce piles.

In the course of the ongoing UNESCO World Heritage project, the Ore Mountains Mining Region , the Plattner Kunstgraben is one of six key objects in the Ore Mountains in the Czech Republic.

The Grabenweg was designed as a nature trail with 24 trilingual information boards.

Tin mining

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The ore extracted from the pits was sorted by hand. Core ore was taken out and smelted.

The stamping ore (also called hermaphrodite , generally cast granite with tinstone inclusions) was smashed and then ground into fine flour between the stones of the ore mills (the German name of the place Háje: Zwittermühl testifies to this ). Manual smashing was later replaced by rammers from dry stamp mills. At the beginning of the 16th century (since 1512 in Altenberg , since 1525 in Schlaggenwald / Horní Slavkov), instead of the previous mills and dry stamping mills, the so-called wet process was used, in which the ore that was smashed by the stamping mills was washed with water, which the fine gauze on the Purification washers were transported where the heavier pewter stone separated from the light blind sludge. Successive and repeated washing with constant separation resulted in a tinstone concentrate in the washing stoves that could be smelted.

Ore-rich layers were found on the rubble deposits by manual pewter washing, which were then processed in various ways. In the Plattner district, the alluvial deposits in the river beds and on the banks of all local streams were used, as Georgius Agricola describes. In addition, the Zinnseifner channeled the water from trenches into a series of parallel gullies that were stepped down the slope (in the mineralized flood) in the secondary deposit (e.g. in the so-called Lauterseifen on the western tributary of the Plattner Bach opposite the Hirschberg ).

In other places, shafts were sunk in the upheavals , especially in winter when the frost solidified the cohesive rock, so that the ore kingdoms were almost the primary deposit. The conveyed goods were then processed in the spring (in the vicinity of Streitseifen / Podlesí and Seifen / Ryžovna). Tertiary upheavals, which were covered by later eruptions, were also mined almost as primary deposits (in Hengstererbe / Hřebečná and at Gottesgab). Finally, one also worked with the so-called wall conveyor technology , in which z. B. the distributed outcrop of a primary deposit was promoted by manual chopping with a constant supply of water ore-bearing rock was washed away from the wall that lay across the slope like a large step.

In all these types of mining, the main objective was to eliminate the large ore-less fraction (crushed stone, pebbles) and the fine and light sludge from the suspension or soap. The heavier poor concentrate was collected in specifically excavated depressions, in front of inserted partition walls, etc., which the tin washers in the washing stoves then processed - like the product of the stamping mills. In addition to the actual metal content of the processed material or the suspension, the amount of water that was available, as this determined the amount of human work that had to be put into the process, had an influence on the result of the tin washing as well as the profitability of the processing systems . That is why the construction of the Plattner Trench was of such importance for the Plattner tin production and its preservation was therefore constantly given great attention.

literature

  • Paths of Cultural Heritage: A travel guide through the major mining monuments of the western (Bohemian) Ore Mountains, The Path of Mining Monuments, Plattner Kunstgraben p. 23–24, Karlovy Vary Region and National Monument Institute of the Czech Republic, Karlovy Vary 2013, German, ISBN 978-80-87104- 73-6
  • Mining monuments in the mining region Erzgebirge / Krusnohory, German / Czech, Karlovarsky Kraj (Karlsbad region) 2014, nomination documentation for the project "Montane cultural landscape Erzgebirge-Krusnohory", Plattner Kunstgraben p. 47.

Web links

Commons : Plattner Graben  - Collection of images, videos and audio files