Although the five shepherd’s wagons have large wooden spoked wheels, they are not really made for driving around very far. On the contrary, they should stay where it’s quiet and beautiful, so that families from the city, who otherwise could hardly afford such things, can spend a few days in the country. The Upper Bavarian Rottenbuch, a village with 1800 inhabitants in the district of Weilheim, would be such a quiet and beautiful place, and at least for one summer the shepherd’s wagon and the circus wagon with the communal kitchen found a place there. That was 2020, and the special permit from the district office was only valid for this one year. Because wheels or not: Building permits are needed for a wagon village like this, and that didn’t exist on this meadow at the Rottenbucher sports field. The cars have been standing there unused in the parking lot since autumn 2020, and now they should finally go, according to the Rottenbuch town hall. But the sponsoring association of the “discovery village” doesn’t know where to go.
The association and the community agreed that the discovery village could become part of Rottenbuch in the long term. But even before the municipal council could start the necessary development plan, hopes were dashed. The agreed location at the Ammermühle, a former clinic that now serves as accommodation for asylum seekers, has proven to be unsuitable, says association chairwoman Pia Novak. One should not have used the meadows that were leased to farmers. However, the own concept provides that the city children can move as freely as possible in nature. Instead, the municipality offered the meadow at the sports field at short notice – temporarily and from the start only for one year, as Mayor Markus Bader emphasizes. He still considers the discovery village to be “a great idea, a great concept”. After more than a year of standstill, the community recently wrote the club a letter about the car on the sports field, according to Bader it wasn’t the first. Pia Novak then took this letter as a kind of threatening letter: If the cars were not removed from the site by February 4th, then the municipality would dispose of them, at the club’s expense.
The cars are not made to be driven
Novak interprets this as meaning that the municipality wants to destroy the association’s property, while Mayor Bader asserts that – “for God’s sake” – nobody thinks of such a thing. The club just has to take care of its property in a very practical way and can’t just leave it where it is. Bader believes that it is impossible for the discovery village on the sports field to resume operations, even beyond the expired special permit and the current communication problems. It no longer fits there, the municipality is currently creating a storage space for the building yard, and at some point after the pandemic there will be more activity on the sports field again.
So the shepherd wagons should go. But they are not made for driving. That’s why they have to be transported on a low-loader, which costs a lot of money, says Novak, who founded “Muck – the discovery village” in 2015 and inspired a number of small and large donors and sponsors. Such a move would not be entirely new for the non-profit association either, because for its first three summers from 2016 to 2019, the discovery village found a place to stay in the Hochland youth settlement in Königsdorf in the Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen district, but according to Novak it will be there in the long term did not get along with the hustle and bustle of the camping youth groups. The hope of finding accommodation on a property in the city of Munich in the Aichach-Friedberg district was dashed at the time, Rottenbuch seemed to be the salvation – until recently. The costs for the apparently inevitable next move would probably be taken over by a foundation that has already supported the association. But it still needs a bit of time – and the low-loaders have a goal.