Lost Place - a photo on Flickriver

Lost Place

            Not the kind of view you normally associate with the term, but in a way, that's what many, if not most of them look like. Until roughly 100 years ago, somewhere on the field to the left of the road, was the village of Stragholz. Nowadays nothing of it remains; nothing you can see at first glance anyway. There's some trees here that you can still tell marked the perimeters of something once, and occasionally you find broken pieces of pottery and roof tiles in the shrubs, if you know where to look. (Which I don't.)

Up to 20 people lived here in the 1800s, which probably implies there were three or four houses here, timber frame structures presumably. The kind you find in museums like Lindlar and Kommern now. I can't help but wonder how many people lived out their lives here and never once made it to Cologne as the next biggest city, some 20 kilometers away. Traveling even short distances by today's understanding was so much more of an undertaking when your fastest means was a horse. To Wermelskirchen and back, which you can see on the hilltop in the background, is easily a day's march if you don't have any motor vehicles at your disposal. Google maps says it's almost exactly 3 hours from here to Wermelskirchen market place on foot. One way, and on modern roads, in modern shoes, not planning any breaks along the way.

Now, toward the end of Stragholz, some point in the 1910s or 20's at the latest, that wasn't so much the case anymore. The railway was going strong at that point, and the first cars also were starting to come about. And people indeed did start to travel, but from many places like this, it was usually only one way, and off to America. The age of emigration spelled the end for countless small homesteads like this, and whole tracts of land became depopulated almost completely.

With that in mind, it can't be terribly long ago that the last people who still had living memories of Stragholz, have passed away. And now we have the omniscient unavoidable internet, and it knows next to nothing about this place. Only the fact it once existed, and where about it was. It is in the truest meaning of the term, a lost place.

Taken in: Germany / Northrhine-Westphalia / Rheinisch-Bergischer Kreis / Bömerich (show map)

Taken on: January 18, 2025

Tags:

landscape

history

path

winter

spring

hills

nature

scenery

Germany

rural

Deutschland

Odenthal

BergischesLand

snow

forest « less

Sets appears in: • Wood & Water

Groups appears in: • Germany • Paths and Trails more » • The World In My Eye • Rural Europe • Germany: Bergisches Land • The World Through My Eyes ... • Hills and Mountains • Down the Road • The Flickr Underground • Elusive History « less

Stats: 316 views

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