Herschweiler-Pettersheim

Herschweiler-Pettersheim
Coat of arms
Herschweiler-Pettersheim
Location of Herschweiler-Pettersheim within Kusel district
Coordinates: 49°28′37″N 7°20′59″E / 49.47694°N 7.34972°E / 49.47694; 7.34972Coordinates: 49°28′37″N 7°20′59″E / 49.47694°N 7.34972°E / 49.47694; 7.34972
Country	Germany
State	Rhineland-Palatinate
District	Kusel
Municipal assoc.	Oberes Glantal
Government
• Mayor	Klaus Drumm (SPD)
Area
• Total	7.47 km2 (2.88 sq mi)
Elevation	370 m (1,210 ft)
Population (2015-12-31)
• Total	1,308
• Density	180/km2 (450/sq mi)
Time zone	CET/CEST (UTC+1/+2)
Postal codes	66909
Dialling codes	06384
Vehicle registration	KUS
Website	www.herschweiler-pettersheim.de

Herschweiler-Pettersheim is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Kusel district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Oberes Glantal.

Herschweiler-Pettersheim lies in the Western Palatinate in the upper Ohmbach valley, which forks to the northwest into the Langenbach valley and to the northeast into the Klingelbach hollow. At the fork, the Harzhöhe climbs from 275 m above sea level to a 372 m-high sloping terrace and onwards to an elevation of 412 m above sea level at the top. Because it is so windswept, four wind turbines were installed on the mountaintop in late 2001. The village’s own elevation is 274 m above sea level. As part of the North Palatine Uplands, the local natural environment is characterized by an extraordinarily intricately compartmentalized relief. It is marked by the constant alternation between jagged mountains and heights with sharply convex slopes west of the Ohmbach and less sharply convex slopes east thereof, along with relatively great topographic variance. Herschweiler-Pettersheim is the most populous municipality in the Verbandsgemeinde of Glan-Münchweiler. The municipal area measures 747 ha, of which 203 ha is wooded.

Geologically, Herschweiler-Pettersheim lies on layers of lower rotliegend, in particular the Middle Kusel Group (ruk2), which is made up mainly of sandstones and arkoses along with siltstones, claystones and conglomerates. There are also limestone deposits, which were once quarried at a mine on the Bockhof as well as at the lime kiln on Landesstraße 350. The lower rotliegend soils are as a rule sandy-loamy to loamy-clayey with clayey-marly bits, as well as being deeply and amply aerated. Thus the plateaux and flat slopes are used as cropland (244 ha), the expanses in the dale and the damp as well as steeper and sunny slopes as hay meadows, grazing land or meadow orchards (all together 179 ha of grassland), and the stony mountain ridges, the pathless, steep slopes and gorges for forestry (95.7 ha municipal woodland and 99.4 ha private woodland). The 437 m-high Hühnerkopf, the predominant peak in the mountain ridge east of the village is a butte formed by a subvolcanic intrusion. The sill formed until 1972 the basis for the local hard-stone industry.