Faistenoyer Bach and Mittelberger Rücken—An Informative Village Walk

> Let’s start our short tour at the train station in Oy 1. From the parking lot, a footpath leads uphill past the Kneipp facility to the village center. We take the sidewalks on the left along Hauptstraße and Wertacher Straße until, at the tourist office, a small sign reading “Faistenoy” directs us onto a farm road leading down into the valley. The sign for the Schwäbisch-Allgäu Hiking Trail guides us across a meadow with no defined path.
We then follow a path downhill to the Faistenoyer Bach 2, cross the road leading to the village of the same name, and follow the pleasant Mühlbachweg, changing banks three times, along the wooded stream.
After crossing the road from Faistenoy, we stay on the stream path toward Horn. At the fork—after another footbridge—we follow the sign for “Mittelberg” and stroll uphill alongside a babbling side stream.

At a fork, follow the Oyer Route and you’ll soon arrive in the high-altitude hamlet of Mittelberg 3 with its well-preserved old farmsteads.
The stone nature trail—a dirt road and later a short, gently descending meadow path—takes us to the plague cemetery, offering views of the Ammergau Alps, with the Zugspitze towering nearby. Before that, a sign on the moraine wall at the edge of the former Lech Glacier provides interesting facts about the formation of the Alpine foothills during the last Ice Age. It takes a bit of imagination to picture that the Iller Glacier once towered a good 200 m above the site of the Mittelberg Church.

After passing the plague cemetery with its monument to the Black Death, we walk along the “Steinmeile” for a short stretch on the road and then downhill along a farm road through strips of woodland beside a stream ditch toward the Rottach Gorge. From the next intersection, we soon head up a small road to the hamlet of Kressen 4, with its aged single-ridge-roof house, and back to Oy 1.