A popular hike for families or groups of children, as the climbs are not particularly steep. The 17.5 km hike reveals the natural beauty of the Teutoburg Forest/Eggegebirge Nature Park with its streams, valleys, meadows and lakes. Dalheim Monastery, with the LWL Museum of Monastery Culture, is particularly worth a visit.
The gently undulating landscape makes for a relaxing hike with gentle inclines. Most of the hiking trail leads through the "Marschallshagen and Nonnenholz" flora and fauna habitat area with beech forests typical of the region.
On your hike, you will pass several stations on the Marsberg-Meerhof nature trail, which make the forest tangible to the senses: An excursion destination for young and old that brings you closer to the various habitats and facets of the forest.
Through the Apfelbaumgrund, you will then reach Dalheim Abbey, a former Augustinian canon monastery. The idyllic monastery impresses with its almost completely preserved late Gothic core complex and its baroque farm buildings. Today it houses a museum of monastic cultural history that is unique in Germany - the LWL Landesmuseum für Klosterkultur. In Dalheim, two inns invite you to enjoy a culinary refreshment stop.
The Piepenbach stream accompanies you to the next picturesque stop, the Husen reservoir, where you can take a break for a while and let your gaze wander over the water. From the reservoir, a detour to the listed burial mounds and the remains of the ramparts of the old Maschallsburg is worthwhile.
Only the ramparts of the old marshal's castle remain today. Mound castles like the Marschallsburg are technically known as "mottes" (from the French la motte = mound). Such castles were built on (often artificial) mounds in Germany, particularly in the 10th and 11th centuries, and usually consisted of an outer bailey and the "high motte".
This area was once home to the "Robin Hood of the Eggegebirge". The legendary, historically verified figure of the gamekeeper Hermann Klostermann was the son of a forester who made the forests of the Eggegebirge unsafe in the second half of the 19th century. Always on the run from the then Prussian authorities and their forestry officials, he provided many a poor family in the region with food and quickly became popular. Among other things, he spent eight years in prison in Paderborn because of his "game thievery". It is uncertain when he died and where he was buried.
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