Uchter Moor, Protected natural area in Lower Saxony, Germany.
Uchter Moor, also called Großes Moor, is a 3,263-hectare raised bog near Uchte in Lower Saxony, protected since 2007. It combines near-natural bog, former farm peat cuttings and bog grassland, and is divided into the sub-bogs Burgmoor, Herrenmoor and Löhmoor. Streams draining into the Große Aue cross the area.
Around 1700 BC a Bronze Age trackway of alder and oak trunks was laid in the Darlaten moor. Peat was cut by hand for centuries as household fuel; large-scale extraction began in the 1920s, when the Bremen merchant Werner Most founded a peat company in Uchte in 1925, and Wintershall AG opened the Gewerkschaft Uchte peat works at the Fuchsberg near Darlaten in 1931, still operating today. Hand cutting continued until the early 1960s, a moor fire struck in 1959, and the area became a nature reserve in 2007.
The moor's name appears in local usage as Uchter Moor, after the town of Uchte; the three sub-moors are called Burgmoor, Herrenmoor and Löhmoor. Since 2006 the Moorbahn Uchte-Essern has run on about 10 km of track, the longest network of its kind in Lower Saxony, with scheduled trips from April to October. A lookout tower and information centre with café stand by the line.
The Moorbahn Uchte-Essern runs a scheduled service from April to October on a roughly 10 km network, the longest of its kind in Lower Saxony, with an observation tower and information centre with café at the site. The bog is divided into the Burgmoor, Herrenmoor and Löhmoor sub-areas, and the Große Aue passes a few kilometres to the west, north-west and north.
In 2000 and 2005, peat cutters in the Darlaten section found the body of a girl who lived around 650 BC, in the pre-Roman Iron Age. It is Germany's most recent bog body find and Lower Saxony's oldest. The finds came in two parts, years apart, from the same spot.
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