Good luck! ('Glück auf' is the miners's greeting, meaning 'Good luck to come up to the surface again safe and sound.') You are standing below the slagheap of the upper gallery of a mine named „Eiserne Krone“
(Iron Crown).The beginnings of this pit are probably in the 17th century and it was originally exploited in open cast mining. In 1883/84, the mine owner’s aim was to exploit the lower ore deposit and so they dug a
fraudulent gallery (438.8 m above sea level) into the mine to undercut the ore lodes. The gallery has a length of 75 m, one cross cut and developed two extract sectors: 1 ) a long fault pit above the gallery mouth and 2) the „Iron Hole“, a fault pit from the beginning of this mine. In the gallery a winze with a floor (10 m deep) was built. A second gallery with a length of 165 metres was built about 40 metres deeper (396.3 m above sea level). It undercuts the second lode but there is no evidence that ore was exploited here. As of 1850 there was active gleaning mining at the fault pits of the Eisernhardt, which you can see from advertisements in the local newspaper of that time. Very likely miners tried to exploit remaining ore deposits with the fraudulent gallery.




Sources: M.Döring (Ferndorf): „Eisen und Silber, Wasser und Wald“, Verlag die Wielandschmiede, Kreuztal