Dornbusch (Hiddensee)

The Dornbusch is a region of low rolling hills in the northern part of the German Baltic Sea island of Hiddensee. It consists mainly of ice age depositions, that were left behind after the glacier thawed. It is one of three island cores of the Hiddensee responsible for the emergence of the lowland.

The Dornbusch measures about 2.45 kilometres from north to south and about 2.85 kilometres from east to west. Its highest point, at 72 metres above sea level, is the Schluckswiekberg, on which the Dornbusch Lighthouse, the symbol of Hiddensee, stands.

With much of its cliffed coast still active it represents an important landscape in the West Pomeranian Lagoon Area National Park and is part of protection zone II. Numerous footpaths run through its varied countryside.

The formation of the uplands goes back to the last glaciation phase in northern Germany, the Weichselian. The Dornbusch was created about 12,500 years ago by a small finger of the ice front that left its mark in the present day straits of the Little Belt and Great Belt. During the retreat of the glacier, the uplands were left behind as a push moraine and for about 4,000 years they were part of a large area of the mainland, south of the present Baltic Sea. During the first flooding phase of the Baltic Sea, the water did not reach the area of Hiddensee; it was only about 3,900 years ago that the Littorina Sea lapped the three island cores of Dornbusch, Fährinsel and Gellen. And it was just 2,900 years ago that coastal erosion (land erosion, dispersal and deposition) and the formation of the elongated shape of the Hiddensee through sand-accretion began.

Under Wallenstein's orders, from 1628 to 1630 the entire oak and beech forest covering the Dornbusch was burned, in order to leave no wood for the construction of ships by the Danes, who were fighting in the region. In fact, the forest had already been at least partly damaged by such action. The supposedly ancient Dornbusch forest is therefore still relatively young; it was only slowly replanted with conifers in 1861, after the first pine plantations had failed in 1780. From 1900, deciduous trees were also planted. Previously, the entire hill country was a belt of treeless grasslands and arable land which was regularly covered by sand in high winds. The felling of individual trees in newly planted forests to meet the demand for fuel resulted in many clearings with much undergrowth.

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Wikipedia