This spring is located along the old road from the Monastery of St. Peter and St. Mary at Hoenigen to the Hardburg Castle and Limburg Monastery near Bad Duerkheim. It is about a half a mile above the former hamlet of Isenach. This now consists of a restaurant beside a lake and a few ruined buildings. A sign tacked on a tree near the intersection of the Isenach Brook and the Einsiedler spring brook says “Hoeningen 7 km”; the next sign upstream says “Hoenigen 7,5 km” !
“Einsiedler”
means “hermit”. The hill to the west of the spring is called the “Klausberg”
and means “Hermit’s Hill”. So there seems to be evidence that the spring once
had a holy hermit or well guardian. The spring has a walled head, with what looks like the remains of a
small building of some sort. There are steps down to the water, which falls
from a pipe into a rock cut basin. .
Immediately
below the spring is a wallow, frequented by the local wild pigs and other
animals. At the southern edge of the wallow is a triangular boundary stone
dating from 1729. Stones such as these usually indicate three manors or estates
come together at this point. The Counts of Leiningen held their property until
the Napoleonic Wars so one boundary could be theirs, one of the others the
Kurpfalz or Count Palatinate. The monastery
at Hoeningen was dissolved in the early 1500’s. It’s successor, a Latin
School of some renown, was destroyed in 1689. Boundary stones of the former
monastery, according to local legend, are “Sanctuary Stones” and have the Keys
of St. Peter carved on them. The boundary stone below the spring has a cross on
one side, but no keys.
The
water has a strong “mineral” or sulfuric smell. My grandson, Taylor, describes
the taste of the water as “horrifyingly disgusting”, so presumably it had some
medicinal values!
