Wayside Shrine and Chapel Hiking Track around Herrieden

by Edmund Zöller

Our Franconia is a wayside shrine landscape as can be rarely found. Wayside shrines are expressions of religious popular life. They are marked cultural monuments and trademarks of our Franconian homeland. Wayside shrines are located in villages, on roads and in districts. Carefully selected by those who donated them, they are often placed at well-circulated paths, pilgrimage routes, sites of accidents and marking borders. They are blazes for the hiker, the farmer when he walks through the open land, the countryman for his prayer of thanks when sowing and harvesting. When walking on prayer request paths, they were the stations where to stop and pray for the Lord's blessing for the harvest of the field. During processions, they used to serve for putting down the monstrance, during pilgrimages they served as a resting stop for a brief prayer.

The origin of the wayside shrines has not been completely clarified. Commonly, almost all religious works placed in nature count as wayside shrines, regardless of what kind of free-standing figures or objects they might be. One thing needs to be kept in mind: that, in most cases, the motifs that once led to the erection of a wayside shrines are not know since inscriptions and written notifications are missing.

Such wayside shrines are full of riddles, they prompt the imagination and give rise to legends and myths. One must merely consider them as signs of the piety of the people and of trust in the Lord. The high field crosses were usually erected to honor and praise the Lord, often also as protection against adverse weather conditions. As a village cross, they are located in the center of town, near the church, in the middle of the cemetery or at the border of the village. A fold-out brochure titled “Wayside shrine and chapel hiking path around Herrieden", with hiking tracks and explanations to the individual wayside shrines is available at the city of Herrieden. Information also available at Phone 09825 808-0.