Erdesbach

Erdesbach is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Kusel district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Kusel-Altenglan, whose seat is in Kusel. The municipality lies in the Kusel Musikantenland (“Minstrels’ Land”) in the Western Palatinate, on the middle Glan, through whose narrow valley run Bundesstraße 420, the once strategically important Glantalbahn (railway) and the river Glan itself side by side with each other. Right at this narrowing in the dale nestles a greater part of the village, about a kilometre long, stretching along both sides of the roadway, lying in some spots right beneath the dale's steep slopes. The other half of the village is squeezed into two side valleys that run down to the Glan through which run the Wingertsbach and the Gölschbach. The landscape around Erdesbach is characterized by the narrow Glan valley with its fertile flood-plain meadows, by the steeply rising, overgrown slopes to the west and northwest and by the far less steep slope to the east with its scant meadow and cropfield soils. The riverside flats within municipal limits lie at an elevation of roughly 190 m above sea level, while elevations in the southwest reach 385 m above sea level and those in the municipal area's east 335 m above sea level. The vegetation cover characterizing local land use takes the form of meadow orchards, meadows and cropfields along with some 60 ha of mixed forest. The south slope at the so-called Wingertsberg (“Vineyard’s Mountain”) was still characterized in the 19th century by vineyards and hillside meadows. The last vineyard was dissolved in 1945. Currently, many vineyard walls are still well preserved. The municipal area was divided wholly into agricultural smallholds; there was not even one major block of land in only one owner's hands. Often, as a result of inheritance disputes, plots were split into ever smaller pieces. The municipal area measures 401 ha.