Landscapes and Terrain in Central Europe

 

So often, when planning a games table that we are going to spend many hours building and detailing, we ignore the actual landscape upon which it is based. We probably get hills, rivers, roads &c. in the right places, but do we look close enough at the style of buildings? Of field types and boundaries or the area covered by woodlands or types of trees? What sorts of crops were grown? The nature of the landscape to some extent affected the style of warfare, so it's good to get it right.
Thanks to Rob Thompson for allowing me to use the following piece which fits in so well with the “Atlas” themed pages.

Landscapes and Terrain in Central Europe ( with specific reference to the seats of wars 1740-1813 in Silesia, Saxony,  and Bohemia)   - Notes for Wargamers:
First The Bad News:  Why it is Tricky to Generalise:

Even if we took the most restricted possible definition of the theatres of war, in order to get the smallest area of study, the variation within it would still be massive.  The (good news ?) is that there would be (and still are) some commonalities across the broadly similar landscape and climate of Central Europe. These commonalities arise from a long period of fairly static, and broadly common farming methods, exploiting a broadly similar environment. However, within that large chunk of land, there would still be (and still is ) significant variation in landscapes, and, actually a series of variationS (plural), superimposed on top of one another, at a variety of scales. As soon as one strays from the Northern European Plain the degrees of localised variation in landscapes increases markedly as the terrain (and climates) become significantly different. This then impinges on settlement patterns, social organisation and farming practices. Culture and ethnicity also plays a part.

What Area is covered?

It’s the area of the upper Oder / Odra and Elbe Rivers as shown on this map of Seven Years War battle sites, at the centre and right centre of the map:

This area was also fought over  by Austria Prussia and Saxony in the 1740s, 1780s, to  a more limited extent in 1806 and again in 1813 – the map below shows the rival armies lining up to contest the region in 1813:
The Northern European Plain:

This lies on the Northern fringe of the area which this appraisal is primarily concerned with.   A few comments about it are in order as the term can be misinterpreted.. It is called a plain but the word can be misunderstood by wargamers and others. Like almost all plains it isn't as flat as a pancake or as flat as a table top. It has no mountains,   . . . . but certain areas might still be of "high relief" i.e. rugged / hilly with reasonably steep slope angles, ravines, incised river valleys with abrupt edges to their flood plains etc    On this map (below)  it is NOT all the land within the ring, (the ring unhelpfully includes the mountainous areas of the Sudeten and Carpathian mountains between modern Czechia and Solvakia to the south, and SE Germany  and Poland to the north).  The plain is rather where the words are located on the map:


 
What Were The Common Identifiable Landscape Attributes of the  Central European Battlefields’ Zone’s Countryside Areas?
1) Data on the % of land which was woodland vis a vis today is very poor. For Silesia, possibly about the same amount overall in 1750 as today, so far more than there was in say 1945. Photos of Lower Silesia from the 1930s and 40s of agricultural areas show far fewer trees then than in today's landscape, in every single case. But in 1750 the population was far less, and hadn't entered the cycle of rapid population growth associated with agricultural and industrial revolutions, which is what reduced the numbers of trees. Post the 1945 population exchanges there were less people in Silesia, and rural to urban migration since then also has meant plots of farmland have reverted to scrub woodland in Silesia.  Bohemia and Saxony changed somewhat less, as they were not subjected to wholesale population transfers in 1945. It is rather more likely that there were slightly more trees in Bohemia and Saxony in 1740-1813 than today.

2) There are many more extensive and medium sized forested areas than there are in the UK. Many communities relied on having access to forest, and the population density being much lower meant that a lot less land had been cleared of trees.  Usually the land left forested was hillier, or was on the sides of ravines (too steep to be cultivated and thinner soils) or, it was the most distant land from the villages. Plus there would have been large tracts of totally uninhabited forest areas, 90% of the Sudeten / Carpathian mountains would have been like this, but also big tracts of uninhabited forest (pines) on areas of glacial sands where settlers had realised that the soils were barren and had kept out. The so called "Pine Barrens" which Prussia was infamous for, and helped explain why Federick the Great was very keen to get hold of the generally agriculturally richer lands of Silesia.  There are however some “Pine Barrens” within Silesia.
3) No hedges.    British wargamers often make the understandable error of assuming there must have been hedges around fields, but this isn’t the case, as there had been nothing comparable in Central Europe to the  “Enclosure Acts” which had shaped the landscape of much of lowland UK.
4) No Yorkshire Dales type stone walls, surprisingly, not even in the mountains where stone was lying about in abundance.
5) An occasional wooden fence, but not around the main  "fields" (strips). It was quite common to have a small area (veg plot / fowl run) fenced off around, or adjacent to, a house.  Fences were usually made from vertically placed irregularly shaped slats of wood: (without the glass jars!)

6) Long thin strips of land were the rough equivalent of what are termed fields in the UK. Size today varies a bit and shapes can be irregular where terrain is hilly or cut up by ravines, but most common dimensions would be 20 to 40m wide by 100 to 500m long. Its likely that since 1750 some strips have been consolidated and back then there would have been more of the smaller ones. "Field boundaries" would have been often not very obvious due to 3) 4) 5). At certain times of year, and according to what crops were being grown they would show up. Eg peasant x has done his ploughing but peasant y next to him has not yet. Often there was a small "baulk" - a tiny unploughed strip to mark the strip boundary, but this could be absent and instead the ploughing pattern would generally be turning soil away from the boundary on each side, so this formed a shallow ditch with the soil surface in the ditch being say 10-20cm deeper than the strips. In some areas some or all strip ends’ boundaries would be marked with a few big rocks.
 
7) The end 8m or so of each strip was mostly not ever ploughed in pre tractor times, as it was the turning area for the plough team. There might also be a crude drainage ditch running along the strip ends adjacent to the road, and quite often the banks and environs of this might have been colonised by a few trees.
 
The most common village form is dispersed linear. Dispersed - each farmstead (house and any associated barns etc) would be situated 30 to 200m from the next house. The houses would typically straggle along both sides of a routeway, sometimes, but not always, often only one dwelling deep, so that each peasant had easy access to the road. This made for very long thin straggling villages compared to the more compact ones found in most parts of the UK. Alternatively there could be a network of tracks on one side of the routeway.  This is a modern picture  and the buildings have been modernised or replaced but it illustrates  atypical sprawling village layout with the long strips running to left and right from the village:

 
9) The long axes of the strips are most often laid out perpendicular to the road or track which they abut, this is so every farmer/peasant can get to one end of the land he works via a track.
 
10) Village buildings - in many cases one end of a building was the barn the middle or the entire ground floor was for animals and the human accomodation would mainly be upstairs at one end. Before the Prussians had colonised Silesia in numbers (1780s onwards), and then built some enormous farms, most houses were relatively small.

This is a 1910 photo, but it is of a certified and listed farm building from renaissance times (part of it, internal, and not visible in this shot, at the back, is actually medieval). The house still stands, and still looks very similar. It is in the village of Karlowiec, between Gryfow Slaski and Mirsk in Lower Silesia, now Poland. It is about 2km from my home in the next village. It is being renovated by friends of ours, using the old construction methods, though they don't have to re-thatch it. I've been helping them occasionally with some bits of the work. One can tell it used to have thatch as a roof material, by the very steep pitch (slope) of the roof. The far end is all barn. The middle of the ground floor to the right of the central entrance door, has a brick vaulted ceiling (as is typical) , and very obviously has been a piggery. It has its own bread oven. This would have been one of the larger farm houses in existence before the Prussian colonisation which got underway at pace from the 1780s.  The incoming Prussians noticeably built bigger farmhouses, but colonisation was reltively slow.  Ground floor walls of the nearest 2/3 are mainly made of rough irregular local stone and some very poor quality brick. Actually there are unfired bricks on the inside of the end wall! All the barn and all higher bits are big wood frame structure with wattle and daub infill originally, some infill has been replaced by brick at a later date. [This half timbered style of house is called "Fachwerk".]
11) Farms were pretty much all "mixed" ( = all farms had both animal and crop production) but few quadruped animals were kept. Reasons were they ate too much of the crops, people were often hungry and their diets were less meat and dairy rich than today. The conversion of plant calories to animal calories would have been well below 10% efficiency, so having lots of animals was risky and wasteful. A median peasant might have one or two cows and a calf. The better off ones might have three times that many and would have owned oxen / steers and or a horse or two. A cow would be walked out to graze a field each morning and tethered there. It might be walked home to drink water from a well at lunchtime and then go back to the field again.
 
12) Chickens ducks and geese were all commonly kept. Most farms would have one or two pigs; the richer ones would have more.
13) Sheep and goats would have been almost unknown outside of some of the very mountainous areas.
 
14) Grains were the main crops in terms of areas planted, but potatoes were becoming more and more common as the 18^th Century progressed.  Just what proportion of the land was under potatoes is hard to say, but more by 1813 than there had been in 1740.   The grains cultivated were a mix of Wheat, Oats, Rye, Barley and Buckwheat.   Most of the ploughable land away from floodplains would be under one of these staple crops - perhaps 60% (?) of the total ploughable land. There was no pre-winter sowing, all were spring planted, so harvested quite late, but staggered in time. The first 4 could get up to head high on the best land by late summer.  Buckwheat takes longest to mature and doesn't get so tall – more like waist high.  A buckwheat field at all stages looks really quite different to the others, it becomes mainly a darkish brown with reddish stems prior to harvest.. Some of what was not cereal land would be growing vegetables - a bit of cabbage (it could be preserved easily as sauerkraut), some turnips and beetroot, and plenty of  protein rich beans / peas for drying than anything else.  Some flax (with blue flowers) for local cloth production as well.   Maybe 20% of the land may have been under these non-cereal crops. The remaining 20% or so would be down to grass for grazing pasture, or hay making. Possibly some was left fallow, but I'm uncertain of this.    There was no yellow flowering oilseed rape until well after WW2.     Below is some buckwheat which has been cut and left to continue drying ripening in stooks in the field. This was sometimes also done with the other cereal crops.

Buckwheat crop in mid summer:

15) Land very close to small rivers would not be used for crop cultivation due to the flooding risk. Thus it would tend to be a water meadow and down to permanent grass and used for grazing or, sometimes, for hay making.  Unlike property developers and speculators today, buildings were not built on flood plains.  Settlements large and small would be often on the first river terrace – one small step up from the at risk area.
16) Small orchards were very common and were usually located near the farm buildings.  Trees were typically big and tall, not dwarf for easy picking and pruning, like many modern varieties.
17) Fish ponds for carp and trout were also very common but there were more in certain areas where the soils were heavy enough to retain water well, or where nearby clay deposits were available to line them. Old ponds were usually quite small say 10 x 10 or 10 x 20m.
A few towns would be dotted about across the rural landscape.   Most would be small – more like what we might term a large village. Approx one every 15-25km or so.   Each town would typically have a large market square at its centre. Many but not all had walls around them though not necessarily in a good state of repair, and by 1813 a still fully walled town was becoming unusual. The reason being that simple stone walls were vulnerable to artillery.
By  1740-1813  wealthier townsfolk were building in brick and were having tile rather than thatched roofs (occasionally slate but only in a few rare areas).  Maybe one in four of the villages  would also have a “posh” manor house, or a chateau-like pile or  a “palace”.
19) Finally, bear in mind that even away from the Sudeten and Carpathian mountains themselves,  all of Bohemia,  a lot of Silesia, (especially in the south), and Saxony are really very hilly.  Using Google earth street view to get a sense of the relief is a good thing to do.
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These notes are my own observations, research and interpretations.  I’ve brazenly stolen/ copied  the photos (for educational purposes not for personal gain).  I first produced a fair few of these notes for a SYW facebook group enquiry.  But since the same question comes up every now and again, I thought I’d make them into a file to be put into a few wargaming facebook groups  I decided to tidy the notes up, expand them a bit and add a few points made by others in the discussion, and to add some more pictures.  They may not be entirely accurate,  and as I pointed out at the start, there is quite a bit of local variation, but I expect they are a fairly good starting point for wargamers wanting to model terrain.
I've lived in the extremity of SW Poland (former Lower Silesia) for some years now (we have a small farm there just 10km from the Izery Mountains  and within spitting distance of Czechia and Germany).  I grew up on a UK farm, and I worked on local farms, but then I spent many years teaching both History and Geography, including the evolution of rural landscapes, and I've travelled fairly widely in the region, visiting numerous battlefields.  Mainly the 1813 ones, but also some from the 1740s and 1750s.   It is an interesting landscape and region.   If anyone wants some help and advice about visiting the region then feel free to message me on facebook. You will be able to find me as I am a group member of this facebook group. [ Bruce Quarrie Rules and Napoleonic Wargame Group ]
Rob Thompson  09/03/2021

To some extent, Rob's description of the landscape where he lives in Poland echoes the area of the Britain where I live on the “Humber-head Levels.”. The dispersed linear villages are the same, built along higher points and low ridges that the roads followed in what was once a seasonal wetland, whilst it has only been within the last 10 years that the old mediaeval strip field systems that were exactly as he describes.