Eiswoog

The Eiswoog is a reservoir, roughly six hectares in area, on the Eisbach stream, locally also called die Eis, in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. It is oriented from south to north in the water meadows near the source of the stream in part of the northern Palatinate Forest known as the Stumpfwald.

Geography

The Eisbach, a left tributary of the Rhine, is impounded southwest of the village of Ramsen near its seven sources, to form a woog. A woog is the local German name given to natural or artificial lakes in this part of the world that used to act as storage reservoirs for watermills and hammer mills or as assembly points for the rafts of firewood or sawn timber.

The Barbarossa Cycleway and Landesstraße 395 state road, which links Eisenberg in the east with Enkenbach-Alsenborn in the west, run past above the lake to the north. The L 395 goes to the city of Kaiserslautern to the southwest and the town of Grünstadt to the north, about 15 kilometres away.

Name

The name Eiswoog may have two derivations: it probably just means "reservoir of the Eis" (Stausee der Eis); for the stream itself was named after the iron ore (German: Eisenerz) deposits in the region. Several linguistic researchers also suggest that another derivation is possible: Before the introduction of refrigerators by Lindes in the 1870s, the reservoir was also used to provide ice. At that time, during the late winter, ice was broken and carried on horse and cart to the ice cellars and ice houses of the breweries and pork butchers in the surrounding area.