Huenfeld · DE

Hessian Skittles

The Hessian Skittles — Hessisches Kegelspiel in German — are a cluster of nine conical basalt hills standing in a tight row across the northwestern Kuppenrhön of eastern Hesse, with the small town of Hünfeld as their gateway. Like pins set on a lane, the volcano cones rise abruptly from a rolling landscape of meadows, beech woodland and river valleys, and the whole formation sits inside the UNESCO Rhön Biosphere Reserve. Local legend says a giant named Mil once used these cones as his own bowling alley. That story is exactly what makes the place so photogenic from a distance: walk or cycle the over-300-kilometre network of signed trails and you keep turning the same line of forested peaks into different shapes — a tidy row from one angle, a jumbled cluster from another.