Border Stone Hike – Grenzach/Bettingen/Riehen # Stage 4

The setting of border stones with the aim of state-legal functions began around the year 1300. Known as "cross stones," they initially served to delineate the area around Basel where travelers and market visitors could count on the bishop's protection. Conversely, they also marked the boundary up to which those banished from the city could approach this restricted area. Over the centuries, sovereign determination increasingly gave way to property and tax law dominance. This applies to our border area in the 15th and 16th centuries. Since then, the border course around Basel and Switzerland has hardly changed. We owe the beginnings of cartography around Basel to this earliest stone setting, as the first maps were mainly documentary evidence of border stone placements. The oldest surviving map by Hans Bock from 1620 reported 82 border stones between Kleinhüningen and Grenzach, which increased to 170 by 1870 and today reaches 218. This also resulted in numbering from 1 to 150, which was only expanded by subdivisions with “a” and “b” for additional stones.

Source: The right-bank border around Basel - by Gerhard Moehring in: Das Markgräfler Land, Volume 4/35, Issue 1/2 - 1973