Article from the November 2000 issue of
A bike tour with an integrated field trip
On Monday 26 June, 2000, three living fossils left Munich by train, heading for the town of Treuchtlingen in the Altmuehl Valley with a bike tour of some 180 km in mind and an integrated field trip to Solnhofen and Eichstaett. My two travelling companions can honestly claim to be geologically completely innocent, however, their innocence ends there and any kind of tour with Sigi and Christian automatically adopts the nature of a journey into the unknown and skirmishes with irate matrons, young or old, are inevitable. This tour was to be no exception.
Lunch on Day 1 was taken in the form of smoked trout, fresh rolls and canned beer on the train, between Augsburg and Treuchlingen which meant we had no delay in heading for Solnhofen, our first scheduled stop. The flat ride on a good track next to the river, through very pretty scenery and a following wind made the first few kilometres to Pappenheim and on to Solnhofen, very easy to bear. Solnhofen’s only real claim to fame is having given its name to the ‘Solnhofener Platten’ or roof slates still to be found on older buildings in the area. The ‘Platten’ form the upper layers of Jurassic dolomite limestone from the Oxfordian, which are also the source of many of the fine Jurassic fossils found around those parts. The only working quarry in Solnhofen is closed to the public, with the exception of guided and pre-announced tours and so following a visit to the obligatory ‘Fossil Shop’ we continued our tour towards Eichstaett.
The first skirmish with the ‘enemy’ took place soon after, when an elderly bavarian matron was spotted, assisting her grandson in some stone-breaking at a small outcrop next to the cycle track. We stopped to look and eventually joined them, because some amazing finds were being made. Christian and I worked together and in a short time we had excavated any number of ammonite fragments, several very good specimens of the brachiopod Rhynchonella ateriana and others of the order Terebratulida, together with a belemnite, possibly Belemnites paxillosus. In the mean time, working alone two metres away, Sigi had reduced his hands to a bloody pulp and found nothing, much to the amusement of the ‘enemy’ and her grandson. No amount of rhetoric from Sigi could save his face, since centuries of natural selection have equipped most bavarian matrons, young and old, with a tongue like a whip-lash and an appropriate vocabulary to go with it. We left the site, now being worked by at least six or seven newcomers and headed for Eichstaett.
We found accommodation just before Eichstaett, with a good view of the fortified bishop’s palace of Willibaldsburg, which is the home of the Jurassic Museum and our first port of call for the following day. The evening of Day 1 was taken up with eating and replenishment of the body fluids diminished through dehydration during the exertions of cycling and rock breaking. The less said about the evening, the better.
Day 2 started with some difficulty, but following breakfast, we set off without luggage for the Willibaldsburg, via the old baroque town-centre of Eichstaett. This turned out to be so attractive that we rescheduled the day on the spot and decided to fit in an hour of sightseeing before we left for the public quarry in the afternoon. The visit to the Jurassic Museum was probably the highlight of the tour. In magnificent surroundings, they have a fantastic collection of fossils from the area, including one of the six examples of Archaeopteryx lithographica, fish of all shapes and sizes, a fossil crocodile four metres long, many other reptiles, ammonites, brachipods and displays full of beautifully preserved mollesca and insects. Perhaps best of all, are the numerous long and short tailed pterosauria which were being displayed as part of a special exhibition, together with life-sized models of the same. More about the museum later.
Our sightseeing tour of Eichstaett was also very rewarding. The highaltar in the cathederal is certainly one of the finest that I can remember seeing and seems to have been constructed in 1490 and reworked in 1880. An hour later than scheduled, we reached the quarry above Eichstaett, which is open for public access. Following the exertions of the ‘climb’ the last traces of hangover were completely dispersed and we looked for a suitable place to start excavating, amid the hordes of school kids who had also made the museum unsafe during the morning. The lack of local knowledge as to the best level to excavate meant that our efforts stood little more chance at being successful, than winning a lottery, and so it turned out. Despite moving several times to higher levels, the damned quarry wall got steeper and steeper, we obtained nothing more for our pains than numerous plant imprints which have so far defied definite identification. We left the school kids with the remains of our plates and returned to our digs to collect our luggage and have a very late lunch.
The hour of sightseeing in Eichstaett meant that we had no time for further roadside excavations but rather that we needed to cycle like the clappers to make up time and reach our next stop, Beilingries, before nightfall and find accommodation there. The limestone hills each side of this part of the river valley were occaisionally unwooded and the tough-grass slopes reminded me of the North and South Downs of Kent and Sussex, they were also home to numerous sheep which supply the local hostelries with excellent lamb.
Day 3 of the tour was without fossils, but full of interesting discoveries such as the Ludwig-Main-Donau Canal, built in the 19th century by Leo von Klenze, a bavarian Telford, who completed the earlier dreams of the Romans, Carl the Great, Napoleon and Wolfgang von Goethe and joined the North Sea to the Black Sea via the Rhine, Main and Danube rivers. The modern Rhine-Main-Danau Canal uses some of the old excavations but is something of a white elephant, whereas in Hamburg ‘Ship ahoi!’ is the greeting, on the new canal its ‘Hoi a ship!’. The tour ended proper, with a boat trip from Kehlheim along the gorge that the Danube cut through the limestone cliffs to join up with the Altmuehl, to Weltenberg with its magnificent Monastry Church, brewery and beer garden, all within the monastry walls and all built by the Asam brothers Cosmas and Egid, who were also responsible for one of Munich’s baroque churches and numerous other bavarian masterpieces.
If OUGSME ever decided to, say, visit the Eichstaett Jurassic Museum, the museum is prepared to organise a guided tour in english and a field trip to one of the local quarries. Certainly any ‘fossil freaks’ will have a great time and it may be possible to combine Eichstaett with a visit to the meteorite crater, the ‘Noerdlinger Ries’ which is only some 50 km from Eichstaett. This would make a more balanced trip and offer something for the more ‘hardware’ orientated.
Mike Molloy, Munich
If you like Mike and his bike, here is more of the like: A Bike Tour with an Integrated Field Trip, Crossing the Danube, with dry feet and KTB Windischeschenbach.
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Last modified on Saturday, May 27, 2006 at 11:25
