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Being open on all sides the west and south-western winds bring rain to the region. Although the places at the north and east slopes are protected against it, they are in the winter open to the cold winds from the north and east. So the winter months are unfriendly, the spring is very late and in the summer and autumn the temperature at night cools down enormously. The annual average temperature is in 300m 7,7 °C, in 650m it is only 6,2°C. Generally the climate of the Vogelsberg is called “bracing climate”; it is said to be very favourable for treating lung diseases and infected respiratory tracts.
The climate of the Vogelsberg is called “bracing climate”.
In former times when the sun went down blood red in the evening people thought “the wild hunter” would haunt the Wetterau. He always came down the hills and announced his arrival with fiery stripes in the sky shortly before the falling darkness. Then all people ran into their houses. Once a wheel shall have broken away from the waggon of the “wild hunter” and shall have fallen to the earth. The noise was so loud that people feared a heavy thunderstorm to come.
“When there is no real winter there won’t be a real summer”, people used to say. After a hard winter they were waiting for a good and warm summer. In 1888 there was no real spring and summer; it was just a kind of a late winter.
The winter of 1894/95 was one of the hardest the Vogelsberg has ever seen. Even the oldest people couldn’t remember having ever seen so much snow for such a long time: “On the road from Engelrod to Ulrichstein people walked for months and months between high snow walls of 1m – 3m …” according to a clerk in a church chronicle of his Vogelsberg parrish.
Joy in the winter?
It can also be very warm in the Vogelsberg. From the church chronicle (s.a.): “It has not rained since Februarry 23rd, 1893. The oldest people don’t remember another comparable drought. All people are full of despair. No tip of grass in the meadows. If God doesn’t send us rain we are heading for an awful famine. Oh. God, protect us from it mercifully. In June 21st misery becomes even greater, sunshine, nothing but sunshine!”
(Translated from German by Heidi M. Schneider)
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