Mühlentäler-Weg KC 83

Documents bear witness to this: "A mill in the ground with a dwelling, fields, meadows, cutting passage and two grinding passages ... " This was certainly also the case with the (former) mills along our hiking trail and with all the others that bear witness to the romantic past of mills in the deep valleys of our Franconian Forest homeland. We know from Otto Knopf that the miller's work was not always romantic: "Wasn't it mysterious when the bell rang at night to announce to the miller that another sack of grain had to be poured into the mill? Wasn't it strange, this heavy, rumbling movement of the millstones, this sudden standstill of the saw frame when the water was dammed up further up the valley and the rivulet no longer had the power to turn the mill wheel? Yes, the day of the grinding and cutting miller probably had many breaks, but rarely an end."

From the parking lot below the Hauptmann inn, we turn left and walk along the cul-de-sac towards Grümpel along the former raft stream of the same name out of the village. Before the village sign, however, we turn right onto a forest path and follow it parallel to the road and Grümpel for a good kilometer. At the end of the forest, in a right-hand bend of the path, we turn left onto a meadow path and reach the small road coming from Steffahof. It leads us over the Grümpel back to our valley road. We now walk steadily up the valley through the "main village" of the scattered settlement of Grümpel to Untere Grümpelmühle.

On the way, individual houses of this settlement in the Grümpel valley and on the slopes of the 564 m high Eichberg greet us from the steep forest slopes that line the quiet, idyllic valley. In the beautiful valley landscape, raft bridges remind us of the centuries-old trade of rafting. We walk further up the valley, then turn left to the Obere Grümpelmühle. Passing the building on the left, we walk up a natural, easy path to a hillside path. We follow it further uphill and walk through old spruce stands interspersed with deciduous trees and individual firs. This forest path on the steep slope between the valley of the young Grümpel and the heights leads us out into the open onto the road coming from Effelter and leading into the Grümpel valley. It leads us uphill to the left to the nearby, pretty mountain village of Effelter. Situated 576 m above sea level between Dober and Grümpel. On the way, we look back and enjoy the view of a beautiful section of rock and the opposite slope of the still young Grümpel valley.

In Effelter, the original form of the Rundangerdorf village from the late 13th century is still preserved. Otto Knopf writes: "The formerly uniformly slated, mostly single-storey residential buildings of the 18th/19th century with the gable end facing the elliptical village green. The former common land (Allmende) is still recognizable, even though it has been developed with a church, a cemetery, a pond and some houses without the original parcel of land. The strips of land behind the farmsteads are heading towards the forest."

We walk straight ahead along the through road in the pretty village downhill past beautifully tended gardens and front gardens until we reach the European long-distance hiking trail 3+6 shortly before the Effeltermühle youth meeting place. We walk downhill with it in the open valley and cross the Dober on the footbridge created by the Effelter gardening association.

The stream is called "die Dobra" in Thuringian and "der Dober" in Franconian. The former raft stream rises between Brennersgrün and Wetzstein and forms the Bavarian-Thuringian border over a length of 2.5 km.

We continue on until the valleys of the Dober and Kremnitz rivers merge at the top of the Gehrenwald forest to form the Kremnitz. We walk down the valley through a varied valley landscape on field and meadow paths and trails, often crossing the stream on historic footbridges, until we see the few houses of Geschwend after the parish forest on the eastern slope in an open field. Now it's not far until we cross an old stone bridge over the Teuschnitz and reach the long, wooded village of Gifting with its St. Joseph's Church.

At the sawmill, we cross the valley and the Dober to the eastern side and follow a fairly steep hunter's trail uphill in the forest until we reach a forest path. It leads us uphill to the left in the forest, later through the open meadow, to the height of the Leitenberg to a martyred site and the panoramic map of the Hesselbach village community. Here you have to pause briefly to enjoy the beautiful Franconian Forest view described there, which fully compensates for the ascent. We walk down the farm track and turn right* onto a track into the forest. Initially, the hiking trail runs along the hill, but then descends quite steeply on natural forest paths through various sections of the forest and soon reaches the first houses at the lower end of Wilhelmsthal, where we started the hike.

*We can also hike straight ahead on the KC 81 circular hiking trail to nearby Hesselbach and then walk back to Wilhelmsthal on one of the two ridge trails (KC 81 or Fronbauernweg) with beautiful views.