Beuren, Cochem-Zell

Beuren is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Cochem-Zell district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Ulmen, whose seat is in the like-named town.GeographyLocationBeuren, which is found on the heights above the Moselle, lies in the Vordereifel (“Further Eifel” – not to be confused with the Verbandsgemeinde of Vordereifel, which is in the Mayen-Koblenz district), only 5 km upstream from Bremm on the Moselle. The municipality has an elevation of roughly 400 m above sea level and an area of roughly 1 000 ha. There are about 500 inhabitants.NameThere are 15 places in Germany named Beuren, all of which likely draw their names from German words such as bauen (“raise”, “cultivate”), bebauen (“farm” in the verbal meaning) and Bauern (“peasants”, “farmers”).HistoryAbout the year 1920 during building excavation work, a whole underground maze of passageways some 1.8 m high with peaked ceilings, well preserved inside a cliff, was unearthed. The walls showed no trace of any work done with the customary striking tools, but rather they had been painstakingly hewn out of the stone with thrusting tools. Here and there, narrow shafts leading up to the surface had been bored, through which spoil might have been lifted in leather sacks. The apparent use of thrusting tools has given rise to the supposition that this maze of tunnels might have been the Romans’ work.