The “Boy Scouts”
When I was a young teenage boy me and two years older cousin and had a kind of private "Boy Scouts Group". We spent a lot of weekends hiking in “Taunus”, a hilly region in the north of Frankfurt.
We bought two blue (way too big) shirts, filled our backpack with food and sweets, took a bottle of water each, our obligatory knifes, hiking sticks and bought train tickets to one of the end-stations of Frankfurt's then new S-Bahn in Taunus. From there we spent the whole day walking to another station to drive home from there. During these days in the forest we were singing funny songs, observing the nature, meeting other people and simply enjoing our youth. Later we did bicycle tours with our tent and cooker - but that's maybe another story.
One of my favorite destinations on these hikes was a mountain in Taunus called Altkönig. Though it is pretty steep to hike to the 798 m high top I always liked it because of the very special vegetation and it's history. In fact almost 2400 years ago there was a celtic fortificated village on top of this hill, surrounded by two oval stone walls. The remnants of these walls can still be seen when climbing to the top - though the walls are long decayed, the stones are still there in the form of two cairns surrounding the uppermost part of this hill which can be even spotted on Satellite pictures.
The higher central part did not have as high trees as the lower parts of Altkönig but it was covered by a kind of special hilly vegetation formed by small "cripple pines" and blueberry bushes covering the soil. The top area was only covered by long grasses waving in the wind and catching the sunrays. It was always a magical atmosphere being there - no wonder why the Celts had chosen this mountain as place for their fort. (The Celts are an ancient European tribe who was living in an area ranging from north of today's Ireland via the French coast at Atlantic Ocean to the center of Germany. As far as I know they did not leave any written heritage, so not very much is known of them. They disappeared - or moved back to the north - when the Romans occupied central Europe from South (their home is called Italy today).)
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