Determined to chill out this ride and not push on we stopped (on a long climb) to look at something we had spotted during the spring from the road when the lack of foliage had revealed a stone urn at the village of Appenrode. It looked like the type of stone urn that you often find at great houses but there was no great edifice to be seen or ruins thereof.
Now partly overgrown with ‘Impatiens Glandulifera’, what we found were two monuments to the Barons of Uslar-Gleichen. The less ornate stone ‘boulder’ denotes members of the male line lost in wars from 1870 to 1945, and the other with the nice urn on top was erected by the family children in memoriam to their parents.
The Uslar-Gleichen’s may not mean much to us today but their history is long, very involved with the twists and turns of politics like so many other noble families across Europe vying for position in the hierarchy, even King George of England has a role (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uslar-Gleichen).
Now the family no longer hold manorial sway, but they have retained their wonderful family title of ‘Knights of the Principalities Calenberg – Göttingen – Grubenhagen’. Apart from archives gathering dust you will find few traces of them other than this ‘Grabmonument der Herren von Uslar-Gleichen’ and the two now ruined castles that sit atop the nearby Gleichen Mountains.
Also of note is the village well the ‘Wieseneck Brunnen’.
The male family members who died for the Vaterland:
Franco Prussian War
Wilhelm 1847-1870
Odo 1855-1870
World War One
Rudolf 1869-1914
Alexander 1882-1914
Odo 1892-1914
Eugen 1876-1914
Hans Ludolf 1879-1918
World War Two
Herbert 1901-1939
Horst 1911-1944
Berndt 1923-1945
Friedrich 1882- 1945
The Ride: No GPS and I never ventured to use my big chain ring. A mixed surface ride which ended with cake before a final spin along the watchtowers overlooking Goettingen.
Cycle Fahrrad Goettingen home page
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