Reclaiming Doggerland

Langlütjen – Eckwarderhörne

22 December 2015

That winter, Tom’s mother was visiting. He thought she would be interested in Langlütjen and was determined to go again. My scepticism about this venture turned out to be misplaced. When we arrived, not only was the tide out, making our route over to Langlütjen I easier, but the island seemed to be entirely abandoned. The “no entry” signs were either gone or blacked out.

We walked around the edge, taking care not to trip on the loose rubble, which the island was made of. Originally a sandbank, the island was fortified by the Prussian Navy at the time of the Franco-Prussian war. Langlütjen II was built a few years later, slightly farther out to sea. Both forts were decommissioned in 1918, having never been used.

During the second world war, Langlütjen I was used as an anti-aircraft position. I’d read that the defences were blown up at the end of the war, and the rubble was covered with sand. As we went into the small inland area, however, ruins of the fortifications were still very visible.

Wandering across the island, we noticed we were entirely alone here. The place seemed to have its own ecosystem, somehow protected from winds and frost, and we were surprised to see how many flowers were in bloom in late December. Tom’s mother had been reading about Buddhism, and she thought this could be a sacred site.

From here we drove across Butjadingen to Eckwarderhörne, where we sat for a while in the restaurant below the beacon, looking over toward Wilhelmshaven. We tried to work out where our apartment had been, when we were living there the previous year.

Beside the restaurant were two memorials, one commemorating the dyke building works of the early 1980s – “no land without dyke, no dyke without land” – and one dedicated to the dyke reeve Kuhlmann, about whom I can find no information on the internet.

Posted in Perambulations | Tagged dykes, forts, islands, memorials, Weser Estuary | Leave a response

Nordenham – Langlütjen

15 August 2015

On one of the only days of sun we’d experienced that summer, we finally made use of a car-sharing scheme we had joined. Tom drove us to the Weser estuary at Nordenham.

We had missed Nordenham on our previous visit to Butjadingen, but I was interested in the town, as I had read that it had grown from the cattle trade in the 19th century, sending livestock from here to England.

The so-called founder of the town, Wilhelm Müller, is known for organising the building of the Ochsenpier (or “ox pier”) in 1857 enabling cattle to be transferred on to ships. As the shipping trade grew through the late 19th century, the dwelling-mound villages of Atens, Blexen and Einswarden (incidentally, all of which had been devastated by the Christmas flood of 1717) became incorporated into the former estate of Nordenhamm. The final “m” was supposedly dropped to make the town sound more like somewhere in England, as a friendly gesture to traders from the other side of the North Sea.

Tom was more interested in the riverside beaches but was disappointed when we realised that swimming was strictly prohibited. We stopped for a light meal by the river and walked a little around the town, which seemed sadly quite run down.

We then drove to the village of Tossens where we parked the car, crossed over the dyke and walked back toward Blexen. Tom had read about the artificial islands of Langlütjen, which had been built in the 19th century as forts for the Prussian military, to protect the ports of Bremen and Bremerhaven. He said we could follow a causeway, formerly used by tanks, to cross on to the closest of these, Langlütjen I.

The tide was high and only a narrow stretch of bricks took us across toward the island. The water was incredibly calm with terns hovering above us and swooping into the shallow sea. I am no ornithologist, but I convinced myself they were arctic terns, which are known to migrate the longest distances in the animal kingdom.

When we reached the island, we couldn’t proceed past the 1980s radar tower, as a fence blocked our path with signs saying “private”, “no entry”, “beware of the dog”. A man who seemed to have been hiding, waiting for trespassers, came out and explained it was private property. He said there was nothing for us to see, and we should give up and go back.

Langlütjen II, he said, would be more interesting and we should instead go there on an organised excursion.

Posted in Perambulations | Tagged cattle, dwelling mounds, forts, islands, Weser Estuary | Leave a response

Eiderstedt

22 February 2015

A day later, we used the hire car and drove to Eiderstedt. We had been here once before, as we’d planned to move to Tönning when circumstances changed and we ended up in Bremen.

The peninsula was formed when two groups of islands, Utholm and Everschop, were connected to a smaller headland during the 14th and 15th centuries. Frisians had inhabited the islands from around the 8th century and defended them with low ring dykes and dwelling mounds. As dyke-building techniques improved, and particularly after the destruction of the Saint Marcellus flood of 1362, polders were created on the tidal inlets, drained by a series of ditches.

Reclamation continued until the 20th century. The latest polder (or “Koog” in the local language) was Tümlauer Koog, inaugurated in 1935 as the Hermann-Göring-Koog.

We visited the polder, which had been in the news in recent years because of its bell, known as the Kinderglocke, that was originally made for Göring’s visit for the inauguration. The bell had previously hung in a wooden tower and, I read, was originally intended to be rung to warn of floods. In practice, it was rung every time a child was born on the polder, earning its name “Kinderglocke”.

Due to cracks in the metal, it was removed from the tower in 2008 and moved to a pedestal by the war memorial, where it sat – inscribed with Göring’s name, swastikas, runes and a Third-Reich eagle – until a tourist complained to the regional authorities. On our visit, an unadorned replica of the bell sat in its place. Beside it, a memorial notice explained that the original bell was put into storage in 2012 after a “storm of public outrage”, and this replacement was donated by an anonymous benefactor.

It was slowly getting dark, and so we didn’t spend long before travelling the short distance to Sankt-Peter-Ording on the western tip of the island. Leaving from the multi-storey car park, we crossed a bridge over the dunes and on to the huge expanse of beach.

On our previous visit, it had been such heavy rain that we only managed to wade across the sand and climb into the nearest of the many cafes on stilts. Not only was the beach flooded but the air so heavy with water, we couldn’t see farther than a few metres in front of us. But today, despite being midwinter, it was clear and so walked to the water’s edge.

As darkness descended in the mid-afternoon, we sat outside a cafe and drank overpriced mulled wine. A few hours later, we returned the car in Bremen and took a tram home.

Posted in Perambulations | Tagged dykes, Eiderstedt, Hermann Göring, marcellus, peninsulas, polders | Leave a response

Bremerhaven

8 February 2015

When we came back to Bremen in November, we visited Bremerhaven as I wanted to see the harbour, which supposedly influenced Goethe’s use of land reclamation in Faust. We walked around the artificial basins, but the weather was relentlessly rainy, and so I didn’t bother taking pictures.

At the beginning of the new year, Alessandra and Katie were both in Germany, and we returned to Bremerhaven to spend a day together at the nearest place you could describe as a seaside town.

What I notice about Bremerhaven is how much it seems to be dedicated to somewhere else. The indoor shopping mall is designed to look like a Tuscan village, the 1890s front light is built in the style of a minaret and stands above the rocky artificial cliffs of the local zoo with its polar bears and chimpanzees. The city claims to be home to the only museum in Europe devoted to emigration.

We drove across the vast container port, the steely January skies getting yet darker as the afternoon progressed.

I wanted to visit the tower of the church in Imsum, just north of Bremerhaven. The church was built in the 13th century, its parish originally including the village of Lepstedt (or Lebstedt), which lay west of here but was washed away during a storm tide in the late middle ages. The church found itself by the sea and started to be used as a beacon for ships travelling in and out of the Weser. The nave and spire were removed in the 1890s, but the tower remains visible over the dyke and is known as the Ochsenturm. It is accessible as a viewing platform, although it was closed on our visit.

The drizzle was getting too much to bear, and so we drove back.

Posted in Perambulations | Tagged beacons, churches, floods, Goethe, Lepstedt, ports | Leave a response