Qualla: Teufelsmauer

Teufelsmauer: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit YvoBentele, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the version told around Timmenrode, the Devil lost the Harz because a farmer's wife tripped on a pebble. He had wagered the Lord that he could raise a boundary wall in a single night, as high and as strong as an emperor's buildings, and take the ore-bearing mountains for himself while God kept the fertile plains. The wall went up in the dark. Then a woman carrying a cockerel to market stumbled, the bird stretched its neck in the basket and crowed, and the Devil — thinking dawn had beaten him — hurled the last stone at his own work and smashed most of it down. What is left is the Teufelsmauer, and it runs, in fragments, for twenty kilometres along the northern rim of the Harz.

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Image: YvoBentele | CC BY-SA 4.0

Teufelsmauer: Rock Turned Upside Down

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Peter, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. The wall is real enough, and its geology is stranger than the legend. These are hard sandstones from the Upper Cretaceous, laid down flat as marine sediments and then caught in the uplift of the Harz along the Northern Harz Boundary Fault. Along the whole northern edge of the ran...

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Image: Richard Peter | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Teufelsmauer: Three Surviving Fragments

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Axel Hindemith, Public domain. The band outcrops in three places between Ballenstedt in the southeast and Blankenburg in the northwest. It starts with the Gegensteine northwest of Ballenstedt, weathered from a silicified stratum of the Emscher epoch. It reappears as the jagged two-kilometre ridge running from ...

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Image: Axel Hindemith | Public domain

Teufelsmauer: Protected Before Protection Was Invented

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dirk Schmidt (Celsius auf Wikivoyage), CC BY-SA 3.0. This sandstone was excellent building material and there was a market for it, which very nearly cost the Teufelsmauer its existence. Protection orders were issued as early as 1833, and again in 1852 by the head of the district authority, specifically to keep the quarrymen off. In...

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Image: Dirk Schmidt (Celsius auf Wikivoyage) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Teufelsmauer: Thyme, Lichen and Flint

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JurecGermany, Public domain. The soils here are thin, sandy and poor in nutrients — regosols and lithic leptosols weathered straight off the rock — and the vegetation that suits them is the pioneer community of open, sunny sand: grey hair-grass and blue fescue, threaded with Breckland thyme, sheep's-bit and ...

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Image: JurecGermany | Public domain

Teufelsmauer: The Wall in the Telling

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kora27, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Grimm brothers collected a version of the story in which the Devil and God contend for dominion over the earth and settle on a division of the land, with the rocks marking the border and the Devil building his wall in triumph, dancing as he works — the Hexentanzplatz above Th...

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Image: Kora27 | CC BY-SA 3.0