This moorland area is one of the few open still waters in the municipality of Weyhe.
According to experts, it lies "on a peaty subsoil that gives the water typical moor characteristics". The valuable biotope can be reached via a footpath between the properties Rumpsfelder Heide 106 and 108 as well as via Schlesier Weg, which branches off from the Böttcherei.
Designated a landscape conservation area in 1938, Böttchers Moor, together with the neighboring biotope "Kleines Moor", forms the remainder of a narrow belt of small standing waters and elongated boggy areas. Around 1770, this landscape segment still extended from the Schlade to the southern municipal boundary, mainly east of the "Böttcherei" road. The more than three-kilometre-long section was embedded in a heath area, which was largely parcelled out in the 19th century and cultivated until the following century.
In the 1830 "Receß über die Special-Theilung der Bruch- und Heid-Gemeinheiten der Bauerschaft Leeste", a settlement on the division of various commons, the "große Böttchers Moor" is referred to as "Torfmoorkuhle". At the time, it covered an area of around 40,000 square meters and was the largest of at least eight small bodies of water located north of the single farm Hahnenfelde in the Rumpsfelder Heide. It is possible that all of them were so-called Schlatts.
Slatts, as they are called in local Low German, are habitats for plant and animal species that have become rare. The waters, most of which are marshy, often cover areas of less than one hectare and only occasionally exceed two meters in depth. They are neither connected to the groundwater nor do they have tributaries. What collects in these depressions with their impermeable soil layers is mainly rainwater.
The experts have yet to find a satisfactory answer as to how the Schlatt depressions were formed. The oldest, according to current theories, could have been formed at the end of the last ice age, more than 11,000 years ago, by swirling meltwater or by blocks of dead ice buried in the meltwater sand, or by wind blowing, in other words: the wind is said to have blown out "random wounds" in sandy terrain by circular vortex movements to form larger cavities. According to another theory, some of the ravines could have formed in this way only a few centuries later.
Many of these mini-lakes and ponds were used as cattle troughs or for flax retting (flax roasting), i.e. for one of the many pre-treatment stages that made the mainly home-grown flax usable for domestic or home-commercial yarn and linen production. The water retting process allowed the usable bast fibers to be separated from the bark and the woody core of the flax stalk. For this purpose, the flax was placed in bundles in streams, ponds or specially dug hollows and weighted down. Depending on the temperature and hardness of the water, the desired result was achieved after just four days, but sometimes only after two weeks.
It is likely that the small moor was also used as a rotting bog at times. Its old name "Rath-Moor" could refer to the Low German "Rote" or "Rate", meaning a pit for rotting flax.
The boggy areas of the Schlatts were sought-after as a source of fuel and were usually flooded again by peat extraction. In the course of the communal divisions, a number of Schlatts passed into private hands, but some remained communally managed and used property - such as Böttchers Moor and the southern "Rath-Moor" (today "Kleines Moor"), which were connected by an artificially created ditch. Easily recognizable on the 1773 map sheet "Leeste" of the Kurhannoversche Landesaufnahme. It is astonishing that the Böttchers Moor is obviously divided into two bodies of water that were only connected by a narrow ditch. It is not possible to clarify whether there may be an error in the depiction and another still body of water should be "depicted".
The Schlatts in the area of today's municipality of Weyhe mainly disappeared due to the cultivation measures of the 19th and 20th centuries or degenerated into garbage dumps. Böttchers Moor was the largest body of still water in the municipality of Leeste and was popular with bathing enthusiasts until the 1970s. Even a small diving board was installed. Between 1930 and 1939, the Leeste primary school teacher Kurt Borchert gave swimming lessons here. Borchert had been employed as an assistant teacher in Leeste in the spring of 1930 after attending the state gymnastics school in Berlin-Spandau. He later taught at Melchiorshausen elementary school.
Many of the former bathers remember the large mudflats as "Esdohrs Moor". It was named after the families of Leester railroad assistant Albert Esdohr (1869-1947) and his son Heinrich (1890-1933), who worked as an architect and designed numerous "war memorials" after the First World War. His father had acquired several plots of land on the eastern and southern shores of the small lake around 1890 and had his residence, house number 176, built on the street "Rumpsfelder Heide". Heinrich Esdohr acquired one of the neighboring houses around 1919.
The name "Böttchers Moor", which is still in use today, goes back to the former inhabitants of the Melchiorshausen farmstead no. 1 (today Böttcherei 150), one of the two nuclei of the village of Melchiorshausen. The farmstead to the west of the Schlatt is already mentioned in sources from the 16th century. Around 1650, Johann Böttcher and his family farmed the so-called Kötnerstelle. A good two centuries later, his descendant Hinrich Böttchter emigrated to North America and sold his estate. The family not only gave their name to the neighboring large moor, they were also the inspiration for the street name "Böttcherei".
Weather
