About ten years ago, driving home from a visit at Lichtenstein Castle, we past along a strange looking huge rock in one of those small villages somewhere around the Swabian Alb. I saw it from the main street, wondering, what it was; so I drove there, got out from the car and noticed a gigantic boulder, size of a house. Actually it was a pilgrimage site. Since it was raining and we were weary from an exhausting day, I decided to remember this place to come back for another day's excursion.
Well - I didn't remember. I had forgotten the name of the place before we reached home that day.
Instead, for the forthcoming years, I was searching for this particular rock or meteorite or Google, on Google Earth, in the newspapers's archives... couldn't find it.
Last weekend, we were invited for a BBQ with friends in the small village of Hausen am Bussen (pop. 246), about half an hour driving from our home. Standing on their porch, sipping my beer, I noticed something familiar on the meadow right in front of me: there it was - my missing boulder!
Turns out, it's not a boulder, but an artificial grotto, built back in 1911. The locals call it "Lourdesgrotte". Its story in short, translated from the website donauschleife.de:
"In 1911 the so-called rock grotto was constructed and created from wire, concrete and mortar. The pastor at the time, Maximilian Schneider, a native of Obermarchtal, paid for the rock grotto out of his own pocket and wanted to turn the community into a place of pilgrimage. The rock grotto is registered in the monument book and is a special original of the community. The grotto was completely renovated in 1996."
So it took me ten years to find out: My mysterious rock is nothing but a replica of the famous pilgrimage site of Lourdes, France. In the beginning of the last century, many replicas like that were built all over the country; a list can be read on German Wikipedia.