Westfalenweg
The Westfalenweg is a medieval trade route . The term was coined in the Gießen area because the route led to Westphalia. The route runs on the Lahn-Dill or Aar-Salzböde watershed. State road 3047 largely follows the old route to the Zollbuche .
Coming from the direction of Gießen , the Westfalenweg, tangent to the Dünsberg and Frankenbach , led to the Zollbuche through Günterod to the Angelburg , the intersection of old long-distance routes ( Leipzig-Cologne Handelsweg , also called Brabanter Straße and Herborner Hohe Straße ) in the Scheldt Forest . From there you could get on its northern continuations (e.g. Heerstraße ) to Westphalia, Paderborn and on to Bremen .
Its route suggests that the path could have been of importance in prehistory and early history, as it connected the Celtic oppidum on the Dünsberg directly with the Wilhelmsteins . The Wilhelmsteine are viewed as a pre-Christian place of worship ( natural sanctuary ) of national importance .
For centuries (until 1854, when the customs barriers with Prussia were lifted), this route was the only way to bring goods duty-free from the Hesse-Darmstadt hinterland to the provincial capital Gießen or to Darmstadt. It ran largely on the Hessian-Darmstadt area and only touched the territory of the County of Solms at the former rest house / inn "Eiserne Hand" .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Friedrich Uhlhorn: Border formations in Hessen, The development of the western border of the district of Biedenkopf. In: Academy for spatial research and regional planning (ed.): Boundary factors in history, research reports of the committee "Historical spatial research". Volume 48. Gebrüder Jänecke Verlag, Hannover 1969, pp. 59, 61, 63.