Agrippastraße in Mürel in Nettersheim

Antiquity meets high-tech: Thanks to airplanes and laser scanners, the perfectly straight Agrippa Road, running between the slopes of the Urft Valley and the Haubach Valley, is visible again. Because the road now lies in a wooded area on the Mürel ridge and is not marked by a prominent embankment, its route had been lost for a time.

This changed with the aerial laser scan: some of the signals also reached the forest floor, so that after filtering out the trees, a relief of the terrain surface emerged. In this way, a roughly two-kilometer-long section of the Agrippa Road route, running straight south, became visible. Previously, the discovery of a gravel strip, which had been noticed during geological surveys, had already indicated road construction work in the area.

In 2009, archaeologists examined the ground and documented remnants of the road, possibly from two parallel routes. The reconstructed width of one section of the road is a considerable 23 meters. Approximately 2.5 kilometers south, in the Olbrück Forest near Blankenheim, a section of the road of roughly the same width has been uncovered.