Tour Report: Hunting Chateau "Top of the Hill"

On the way back from our tour in May 2020, we took a short trip to a low mountain range before heading to a dear friend's house to end our vacation there. An abandoned hunting lodge, which was built at the end of the 17th century and has had a very varied history over the centuries, stands on a ridge in said mountain range. This hunting lodge was the destination of our short excursion that day.

After taking a road with (I think) 36 hairpin bends to get up the mountain, we reached the small side road to the old castle. As we were coming from the north, we didn't drive past the buildings in use opposite and remained unseen.

To avoid being seen from the main road, we parked directly behind the castle.

An entrance was quickly found - as was the realization that many parts of the building were in serious danger of collapse, while other parts already had collapsed.

The condition didn't make it easy for us to move through the building, because the collapsed areas meant that we always had to take detours, for example because a piece of the floor was missing in corridors and we had to find our way across another floor.

That's also why we were denied a view of the highlight of this location during this visit - the musicians' gallery in the church pavilion. We just didn't find the right way through the building.

We postponed this pleasure until our next visit, as we had an appointment for dinner and had to leave after a while.

To find out a bit more about the history of the place and to check out all the photos, click the button below.

Tour Report: Electrical Control A.

After we had finished our second visit to the former mineral oil works, we had actually planned to go straight back to the Husky camp. So we got in the car and drove along the lonely paths that used to connect the individual areas of the huge plant. Today, they no longer cut through a huge industrial area, but only mostly empty, steppe-like wasteland. Shortly before we left the site in the direction of the main road, we saw a group of trees and bushes on the right-hand side, behind which there was apparently another building that we hadn't even planned to see. Of course, we immediately stopped to take a closer look.

It was a classic industrial building, but its purpose was not recognizable from the outside. But the door was open, so we were able to solve this mystery quickly.

It was the control room for the power supply of the former mineral oil plant. The building was full of large control cabinets and everything needed to supply a large industrial plant with many thousands of volts. There were switches and distributors for various distillation stages of mineral oil production, for lights, sockets - and even for the street lighting!

Unfortunately, copper thieves removed all the cables from the building shortly after the plant closed - but the graffiti artists seem to have overlooked this building until now - there were no (or almost no) graffiti. Apparently, the place is rather quiet - so much so, that birds have begun to nest in the cabinets and the controls. We even found a nest that had eggs in it!

This was really a nice unplanned addition for our tour, and we got some nice photos from this place.

To find out a bit more about the place and to check out all the photos, click the button below.

Tour Report: Mineral Oil Processing Plant A.

After going on an extensive exploration tour on my wife's birthday in May 2020, we also took a short trip to a deserted place on my birthday. But this time there were also a few huskies with us! As the CoViD rules in force at the time meant that you were only allowed to travel to another federal state with a valid reason - for example because of work - we had been given a work assignment for our vacation. Two of our friend Ebby's huskies had recently passed their breeding tests, so he had officially commissioned us to take a few photos of them.

We wanted to take these photos on my birthday, and we thought that the remains of the abandoned mineral oil plant would make a nice backdrop. The route there is quite short, so we were only on the road for about 20 minutes. The site is freely accessible and offers a few nice motifs: there are still many oil tanks of various sizes and the former pump house to be discovered.

From our parking lot, we walked out onto the grounds with the two dogs and looked around for suitable scenery to set the stage for the dogs.

After we had taken some pictures of the dogs, we took them for a short walk around the grounds before heading home, as it was very warm that day and we were out in the midday sun, which would have been too exhausting for the huskies in the long run.

Birthe and I took advantage of the good weather and drove straight back to the industrial ruin shortly after arriving at the husky farm to explore the grounds extensively.

Surprisingly, the site is not only freely accessible, but the tanks can also be climbed. Some have an external staircase, others have the maintenance ladder inside. As you never know exactly how the condition and stability of metal changes over the years, I was extremely careful, but was still terrified that something might go wrong. In the end, everything went well and I got some nice pictures.

After exploring the tank site, we got back in the car to drive back, but then spotted another building that we hadn't explored yet...but that's in the next post!

To find out a bit more about the place and to check out all the photos, click the button below.