Hohenfels-Essingen

Hohenfels-Essingen is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Vulkaneifel district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Gerolstein, whose seat is in the like-named town. The municipality lies in the Vulkaneifel, a part of the Eifel known for its volcanic history, geographical and geological features, and even ongoing activity today, including gases that sometimes well up from the earth. Hohenfels-Essingen lies in the Hangelsbach valley framed by the Feuerberg (588 m), the Alter Voß (588 m, with “Liberation Beech”) and the Mühlenberg (585 m, with its well-known millstone quarries). As witnessed by archaeological finds, Hohenfels was already settled in Roman and Frankish times and in 948, it had its first documentary mention. Essingen was first mentioned in a document in 1193 as an estate belonging to the Sankt Thomas Monastery. In the late 2nd century, the Romans came into the west Eifel. Roman troops found natives who worked at cropraising, but who were so small in number that they only occupied a relatively small area. With the systematic opening of the land with military roads and the attendant onset of regional and even national trade opportunities, land clearing was begun in these lands, which were particularly good for cropraising. The land each side of the roads was overlaid with a network of estates that were run both as state and private enterprises. Some of the most important Roman roads ran over the northern heights of Hohenfels and through the Kyll valley north of Trier. In the district Im Keller (“In the Cellar”) in Hohenfels, the remnants of a portico villa were found during building excavations in 1957. Only about 200 metres away in 1914 in the rural cadastral area Auf Grafenfeld in Hohenfels, two Roman graves were unearthed and salvaged for the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier. The great Germanic taking of the land between 400 and 600 destroyed Roman culture and brought the area into the “army kings’” (Heerkönige) hands.