Via Romea Day 43: Nördlingen - Mönchsdeggingen

Wie merkwürdig ist die Situation von uns Erdenkindern. Für einen kurzen Besuch ist jeder da. Er weiß nicht wofür, aber manchmal glaubt er, es zu fühlen.

(Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose.)

- Albert Einstein,  Wie ich die Welt sehe (How I see the World), 1930

Corpus Christi: a public holiday in Germany, the first day of a four-day long weekend. And so, of course, it's going to rain for four days straight! At least that's what the weather forecast said. I planned a short stage for today, only 16 kilometres, as the alternative was a long 27-kilometre day all the way to Harburg. 

The sun was shining when I left my hotel outside the walls of Nördlingen, but there were big black clouds in the sky, so I put my raingear on as a precaution. 

I left my hotel by the train station and walked to the Deininger Tor city gate, built in 1389, where I climbed up to the ramparts in order to walk a section of the wall. It's possible to walk a circle all the way around Nördlingen on the ramparts, which would have looked awfully cute on my gpx track, but would also have added 3 km to my walk, which I didn't need! So I descended the steps at the Reimlinger Tor and made my way out of town, following the same route I had walked in December, when I was here with my friends visiting the Christmas markets, to the Hexenfelsen.

Deininger Tor

Reimlinger Tor

I realised during my visit to the Rieskrater Museum yesterday that what I had thought was the rim of the crater in Marktoffingen was actually the northern rim of the inner crater, shown as a dotted line in the image above, while Nördlingen itself is situated just inside the southern rim of this inner ring. Fremdingen, where I set out from yesterday morning, was on the northern rim of the outermost crater, while Mönchsdeggingen, where I finished my walk today, is on its southern rim, which I will be walking around tomorrow on my way towards Harburg. Nifty!

Walking out of Nördlingen therefore involved an uphill stretch to the Hexenfelsen, meaning "witches' stone", on the top of the inner rim. This inner ring, with a diameter of about 12 km, was formed when the impact of the asteroid caused the "crystalline basement" of violently compressed rock with a depth of 600 to 800 metres to be raised to the surface. According to the explanatory sign at Hexenfelsen, the ring wall of granites, gneisses and amphibolites represents the thin rock rim of a primary crater that was temporarily 4 - 5 km deep and had a diameter of almost 15 km. This primary crater was unstable, and collapsed to become a flat, 25 km wide bowl-shaped depression with a central bulge and a peripheral rim.

The inner crater ring is still visible today as a ring of elevated locations: Wallersteiner Felsen, Marienhöhe (Galgenberg-Hexenfelsen, Meyer's Keller, Stoffelsberg), Adlersberg, Hahneriberg, Steinberg and Wennenberg near Alerheim. The bedrock of these hills is mostly overlaid with carbonate deposits (limestone, dolomite) from Lake Ries, which was formed after the crater was created and lasted about two million years. This sequence of crystalline rock and Ries Lake carbonates, typical of the inner crater ring, can still be clearly observed at Hexenfelsen. 

Hexenfelsen 

As I walked over the flat fields on the other side of this inner ring, the storm you see in the picture above blew across the sky, and I had to put on my rain poncho and stop taking pictures for a while! But once the storm had blown over, it gave way to a beautiful sky and occasional patches of sunshine.

I took a shortcut along the road at one point, as there was very little traffic,  today being a holiday. And so a short day was made even shorter! I was soon skirting the woods that cover the rise forming the outer rim of the crater, then crossing the last couple of fields coming into Mönchsdeggingen, the only place before Harburg where I could find a guesthouse. 

Kloster Mönchsdeggingen was a Benedictine monastery founded in the 10th or 11th century. It burned down in 1512/13 and was rebuilt under Abbot Alexander Hummel; the pilgrimage church was later redesigned in ornate Baroque style. The monastery was dissolved in 1802 due to secularisation, and became the property of the Princes of Oettingen-Wallerstein. In 1950, the Congregation of the Missionaries of Mariannhill took over the monastery as a novitiate for prospective priests, and the generalate of the order, based in Rome since 1970, was also housed here. When the last brother left in 2009, the monastery was finally dissolved. The monastery church and the cemetery became the property of a church foundation, which continues to operate both; the remaining monastery buildings were sold to an investor in 2017, supposedly for conversion into private apartments, though it didn't look very much inhabited when I walked by. The church, however, is beautiful, in a flamboyant Baroque way!

Other than walking up to the Kloster, I spent the rest of the afternoon in my room at Gasthof am Buchberg. I even took a nap, and a bath - the plug had been removed from the tub, but I always carry a silicone universal travel plug, great for foiling guesthouse owners who would prefer you to take a shower, and hotels where they don't want you washing your socks in the sink!

Nördlingen - Mönchsdeggingen 16 km

Walking to the rim of the crater!