Experience hike behind Somoskő Castle

Itinerary:

• From the center of Somoskő, or from the parking lot below the castle, we hike up to the castle (Z trail).
• On the far side of the castle, we descend along the Z trail to the creek, passing by the basalt organ pipes and the stone sea.
• At the intersection by the creek, we switch to the S trail and cross the creek.
• After a small climb, we follow the S trail on level ground all the way to the currently unfortunately non-operational first lookout tower.
• After the lookout tower, we continue straight at the intersection on the S trail, but after a few steps, the educational trail's S marker turns right into the Macskalyuki mine.
• At the junction at the start of the mine, we go straight to explore the mine yard with the help of the educational trail signs, then after returning here and taking the other unmarked path, we climb up to the lookout above the mine.
• Returning on the same path from the lookout, then walking back a bit towards the first lookout, we turn right on the S trail and descend on a steep path towards the parking above Sátorosbánya.
• If we turn right at the end of the path by the creek and after about 100 meters, we reach the parking lot. Here we find a playground, an information point, and a buffet.
• Turning left and following the creek on the Z trail, touching the beautiful Krúdy spring, we return to the castle and further on to Somoskő.

Detailed description of the route:

Somoskő Castle and the world-renowned basalt organ pipes

From the village center or from the parking lot below the castle, we climb up on the Z trail to perhaps the most beautiful castle in Nógrád County, which is located across the border and can be visited for a modest entrance fee. The view is impressive: Somoskő Castle is built on a volcanic vent exposed by selective erosion. It is really special that the volcanic crater, formed during the phase of volcanic breccia made of softer rocks, became visible after the softer volcanic crater eroded away, revealing the lava that once intruded into the rock and got stuck in the vent. From this surprisingly well-preserved castle in Hungary, we have a beautiful view of the Medves Plateau, Salgó Castle, and to the north, the scenic route of our circular tour, including the forested valley of the Sátormegi Creek (Bukovinský potok).

Somoskő has symbolic historical significance since while the settlement is in Hungary, the castle is in Slovakia. It is only a recent development that the impressive ruins can also be accessed on foot from the Hungarian village. Somoskőújfalu and Somoskő belong to Hungary, and the so-called "return" after the Treaty of Trianon is naturally connected to local mining. Dr. Géza Krepuska, a well-known European ear specialist of the era, had estates here, and interestingly, one important English member of the committee for the border delineation was suffering from a serious ear disease. The doctor convinced his patient to visit the site along with the Antant committee members to see the two ethnically Hungarian villages with their own eyes. Thus, the rights to the local basalt and coal mines, including the neighboring Macskalyuki quarry, were left to their Hungarian owners by the committee, who could operate and develop them until World War II and bring the dark gray cobblestones to Budapest free of customs and taxes.

Our tour continues on the Z trail on the far side of the castle. It is worth seeing how the walls were built on the basalt pillars behind the castle; a few steps further down is a viewpoint offering a view again to the creek valley. The main sensation of the mountain lies a few steps further: the famous (especially among geologists, indeed world-renowned), basalt flow featured in high school geography books. Here we can admire basalt columns with pentagonal and hexagonal shapes, sometimes reaching up to 9 meters high, cascading like a "basalt waterfall" down the hillside of the castle hill. Basalt is an eruptive volcanic rock formed during the relatively rapid cooling of fluid, low-silica lava. These special columns were created in a 4-million-year-old volcanic crater by slow subterranean cooling of the lava (which caused the basalt to contract into such regular shapes). This rare geological formation was revealed thanks to the raw material mining for the castle construction.

A few steps below, we find another attraction: an extensive stone sea which can be admired from a built viewing platform. The Nógrád-Gömör basalt region, incredibly rich in natural and cultural sights, and the Novohrad–Nógrád cross-border Geopark showcase this area's unique geological and surface-formation values, hosting over a hundred basalt cones, basalt covers, fissure and vent fillings, most of which are located in present-day Slovakia. Nearly every basalt outcrop, lava flow, and lava cover is surrounded by thin to thick clayey-stony slope debris. Where water washed away the clay and soil layers from between the stones, spectacular stone seas and stone flows formed, like the one in front of us. This stone sea mostly formed naturally during the Ice Age, but to a lesser extent contains debris from the castle construction.

In the footsteps of cobblestones at the Macskalyuki mine

We descend further on a path lined with majestic trees towards the creek (partly due to a former border zone, much of the forest here remains untouched), with our steps resting on fragments of basalt organ pipes forming the stairs. Under a huge beech tree, the mountain's bedrock is revealed: sandstone. Basalt flowed over the marine sediments in varying thicknesses during later geological times.

Although from the creek we can head in both directions, it is more worthwhile to first visit the renowned quarry. Crossing the creek on the S trail and after a short climb, we join a surprisingly even-level path. The construction of the path shows that an 8.8 km narrow-gauge railway once transported the stones from the famous Macskalyuki mine to the processing site at Somoskő, with a customs house located at the border, ruins of which can still be seen along the path. We walk longer on the former railway track, passing a spectacular layered spring, and just before the mine, we meet the red trail. We do not turn onto it, but from the junction, a lookout tower located 50 meters away on the left side can already be seen, from which one of the best panoramas of the area awaits us: the two castles appear one behind the other. Unfortunately, the structure has become unsafe, and the ladder to the top has been sawed off, so it is currently not accessible. Returning to the path, we continue straight for a few hundred meters (while the S trail turns left – the path we will follow after the mine), then turn right toward the mine yard.

Entering the mine, the path soon forks: turning left, we can explore the mine with the help of educational trail signs; the unmarked path on the right climbs out from the mine yard, following the mine edge, and reaches the other lookout tower (to which we will return the same way).

Let's first look around the mine yard! Even if fewer have heard about basalt, perhaps everyone knows cobblestones. They are the romantic stones of old towns, the black and white stones that depict urban atmospheres, as well as those shown in photos about revolutions. And we bumped along on these for decades… This stone was the "gold" of the Nógrád-Gömör basalt region, and the Macskalyuki mine was the largest among the Medves mines. Basalt entered the spotlight in the first half of the 1800s, during the great railway and road construction era, as an excellently cleavable, evenly wearing, yet very hard and durable rock that exploded into the construction industry. This made the Medves Plateau, Central Europe's largest basalt plateau, the center of Hungarian basalt mining, where about 20 mines operated simultaneously in the peak period. The importance of Medves basalt mining is evident by the fact that not only the streets of the Monarchy's cities were paved with basalt from here, but the stone even reached Paris and London.

The Macskalyuki mine is located on the edge of the Medves Plateau, created by the 2-3 million-year-old, intermittently active basalt volcano lava flows. The now forested mine yard is hard to imagine, but in its "golden age" during the 1920s-30s, the mine employed 1,500 people (for comparison: in 1940, after the peak of mining, about 500 workers worked together in the 5-7 mines in Hungary). The continuous presence of so many people naturally required carefully planned infrastructure, not to mention that the traffic conditions at the time did not allow workers to commute daily (they worked in so-called shifts lasting ten days). Thus, a mining settlement arose, consisting of 48 residential units (housing 1, 2, or 6 apartments), night accommodations, offices, shops, and even a school, some ruins of which can still be seen in the vegetation growing in the abandoned mine yard.

It is worth sitting for a while in the now quiet mine yard and recalling memories of old times. The stone blocks were first separated from the wall by hand using wedges, later by blasting. This was when the famous stone cutters, the ritzers, came, who were highly skilled professionals because the stones were not broken by huge hammers but split based on sound at the right place. The ritzers selected blocks suitable for carving or paving stones and then split the basalt to different sizes in so-called ritzer stands (covered workstations). Pieces unsuitable for paving stones were taken to the crusher and sold as crushed stone. A narrow-gauge railway was built to serve the mine, heading towards Eresztvény and the crushing and train stations in Somoskőújfalu. Consider the production volume: 4 steam locomotives and about 80 wagons transported the stones from here. Finally, contrary to popular belief, the cobblestone did not get its name from the Macskalyuki mine but originated as a calque from the German language, where the prefix "cat" is often used somewhat mockingly or diminutively in foreign languages including German.

It is also worth climbing up to the lookout: besides the unforgettable vista of the two famous castles one behind the other, from here we enjoy a beautiful view of Sátorosbánya, the 660-meter-high block of Sátoros towering above it, and also the Karancs mountain.

Returning to the already mentioned junction of the S trail, we descend on a steep path to the parking above Sátorosbánya, where there is a playground and a mobile buffet. From the parking, following the Z trail along the creek, we return to the already known junction, from where we climb back to the castle and Somoskő on the Z trail via the already covered path. Along the way, it is worth observing the alder trees by the creek and stopping at the especially atmospheric and water-rich Krúdy spring.