For several years now, I’ve been walking and running in an outside area of my new home town Ludwigsburg, in the southern part of Germany. As many others, I run and walk to clear my head, to get a breath of fresh air and to stay physically fit. When I walk, I take my photo camera with me. Photographing is a way for me to get to know my new surroundings better. I always take the same route, but the landscape looks different every time I walk or run there, depending on the time of day, the season and the weather.

Often, I am in the field when the sun is almost, or long gone, which makes the landscape look a lot different than during the day. Details disappear, ugly buildings become silhouettes and the lights that pop up everywhere provide the scenery with something lively. The rapidly changing sky during the blue hour, also adds a certain power to the images I see.

This area is only being used for agricultural and horticultural purposes. Here and there you see an electricity cable, sporadically a farm and now and then a cyclist, a runner or someone walking the dog.

This type of landscape resembles the endless ‘Brabantse’ landscape of the region in the Netherlands where I originally come from a lot. Some people consider this a boring landscape, for me it is a peaceful and unpretentious one.

I recently found out, that the road that I’m always walking on, has been built around 1760 by the German duke Carl Eugen. It used to be a 13km long, and very important connection between both castles ‘Schloss Solitude’ in Stuttgart and ‘Schloss Ludwigsburg’ in Ludwigsburg, one of the best kept baroque castles of Europe. If you are standing on top of the hill, where Schloss Solitude is situated, and you look to the north, you will be able so see almost as far as the castle in Ludwigsburg, in one straight line. Unfortunately, the road has been changed and broken at some point in time, and can’t be followed all the way to Ludwigsburg anymore.

This, initially uninteresting, but for me very valuable road, seemed to be on reflection, an important passage for many people in the past. They used it to move as efficient as possible from one castle to the other.