The Bells! The Bells!

I should maybe explain my comment about the bells, at the end of my last entry.

I didn't know this, until I started visiting this area of Germany and I don’t know if it’s the same over the whole of the country but their farms aren’t like ours in the UK. We’re used to seeing a farm as a stand alone building, with its fields around it. What happens where Catherine lives is, that the farmhouses are all grouped together, in a village location, with their little barns and stables around them. The fields are outside the village and this is why the church bells are important. So they start a five minute clanging at 6.30 am, which I assume means get yourself off to the fields. Then at 11.30am, they start again, which is the call to come home for lunch. Then again in the evening, to signify the end of the working day.

There is very little farming done in the area now, the majority is kept to meadows, just cut at the end of the summer. You will see some fields of Maize, or the occasional field of grain. There is little in the way of livestock too. Each town or village seems to have at least one large manufacturing company and a large proportion of the locals work there, or in the local shops and bars. Despite it being an area of so much unspoilt land, very few now make their living from it. Yet the tradition of the bells still continues.

Of course, where there isn’t open grassland, it’s forest and the majority of folk are now are going back to having wood burners installed in their house, having previously ripped them out in the 1960s.

Logs are an important part of heating houses now and those little barns attached to the old farmhouses don’t go unused. Even Catherine, in her 100 year old house, has a garage, which houses a small, vintage tractor. In the late summer and autumn, many people take themselves off to the woods, on their tractors, to spend a day cutting wood that they have purchased from the owners. The neatly split and stacked logs, in huge stores outside houses almost seem like a status symbol. A kind of ‘Look at me, how much wood I’ve put away for the winter and isn’t it perfectly stacked’.

 The photos are of Grossfelden, near to Marburg, an example of a typical, old village in the area.