The Maria Stock Pathway. On the building of memorial landscape in the West Bohemian Region

Research of commemorative assemblages and memorial landscape

In recent decades, a wide range of literature on the geographic dimension of memory and remembering has begun to discuss the interrelatedness of memory and the memorial landscape (e.g. Crang and Travlou, 2001; Dwyer, 2000; Edensor, 1997; Foote and Kenneth Azaryahu, 2007). The spatial dimension became an important part of memory studies, culminating in Till’s (2003) overview on places of memory, the monothematic issue raised in the Social and Cultural Geography journal edited by Hoelscher and Alderman (2004), and the books Geography and Memory (Jones and Garde-Hansen, 2012) and Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative (Ryan et al., 2016). These works demonstrated the possibility of research of the past, which is symbolically and materially expressed in public memorials, heritage sites, and landscapes.

In particular, the research of memory in its spatial dimension initiated by the mobility turn plays a progressively more important role in offering new ways of theorizing how people, ideas, and materiality are interconnected through movement. Based on the arguments of John Urry (2000, 2002) and Tim Cresswell (2006, 2010), which claim that every form of mobility is a way of accounting for the historical movement of meanings and the ways in which these factors are interrelated, many works—primarily in tourism research and heritage studies—have begun to focus on tourism and heritage as a way of highlighting the hidden natural and cultural monuments that form tourists’ memories. They question matter-of-course views on tourism and consequently on walking and traveling as elements that are based on basic dichotomies such as ordinary/extraordinary or home/away in favor of becoming. As Adrian Franklin (2004) pointed out, the process of becoming often has surprising twists and turns and certain unintended consequences that offer a new perspective on the ways that human (and other) objects are ordered in commemorative assemblages (Franklin, 2004: 279).

Partially, this shift was indicated in the works of Emma Waterton (2005, 2014), which are drawn from the “relational turn” and “new materialism” in social sciences, with emphasis on the ways in which humans and material interact in an ongoing process of the ordering of the world. In 2005, she published an article which focused on the building of cultural landscape. It is a process that cannot be reduced strictly to the technical and scientific practice, but it is also the result of the ownership, local knowledge, and emotions. This way, the building of the space of heritage is not only a static site or an artifact, but rather it is connected with the question of engagement of many co-participants, which is formed through the affective dimensions of heritage with potential to form or to disturb the social collectives (cf. Waterton, 2005, 2014).

For Waterton, this theoretical move creates the potential for the examination of narrative elements of memory but also the materiality that contributes to the forming and stabilizing of commemorative assemblages. The interactions among all of these elements indicate that memorial landscape or memory in general is in a constant state of becoming. It is not static; it is a dynamic process of engagement and a performance of both human and nonhuman agency in producing heritage experience. This premise is demonstrated by Waterton and Jason Dittmer (2014) in the case of the Australian War Memorial, where parts of the exhibitions are presented as traditional components, such as textual panels, objects, and imagery engaging with nonhuman subjects like sound, lights, movement, and sensations.

Similarly, in their recent article, Nadia Bartolini and Caitlin DeSilvey (2019) show how the knowledge of past, place, or cultural landscape is not strictly related to the scientific practice but can also be formed via the filmmaking process. In their work, film was used as a reflective medium of archeology through which ethnographic knowledge of heritage-making practice was created. In this case, the engagement of camera, film, interviews, and local settings make it possible to record the spirit of the place as the commemorative assemblages that are typical for an experimental sense of place, aesthetics, affection, and various connections between past and present.

In this sense, there is also a strong movement in tourism research (Jóhannesson, 2005; Van der Duim, 2007; Van der Duim and Van Marwijk, 2006; Van der Duim et al., 2012, 2013), which has explicitly introduced the utilities of Actor–Network Theory (ANT), shifting from one-dimensional time–space typical for the visual and symbolic aspect of the (touristic) place or a one-dimensional narrative aimed at bypassing the gap between producers and consumers in tourism with respect to the hybridity of tourist performance typical for the assemblage of heterogeneous elements and objects that enter into relations with one another to form a whole (cf. Müller, 2015). For a detailed description and analysis of the tourism project, they use the ANT toolbox related primarily to translation (e.g. Jóhannesson, 2005), symmetry (e.g. Van der Duim, 2007), or ontological politics (e.g. Bærenholdt, 2012) as principles of ordering, through which memorial landscape and tourism are assembled into the socio-material configurations consisting of humans and nonhumans including technologies and objects (cf. Van der Duim, 2007).

My aim is to build upon these works and use several principles of ANT, which have been developed mainly by Bruno Latour, in order to describe the building of the Maria Stock Pathway. This conceptual framing allows me to address the following questions: (1) What was the order of the items on the pathway? (2) Who/what was highlighted in the pathway and how? and (3) How did it contribute to remembering? The article thus addresses how the Maria Stock Pathway was created from an idea into real form. Specifically, I draw from my research on remembering the forgotten pilgrimage to present the process of negotiation of the possible forms of the Maria Stock Pathway and how many participants and places are gathered to create it and maintain its existence. The findings presented in this article are based on semistructured interviews with the creators of the Maria Stock Pathway, especially Jiří Schierl, the chairman of the local nongovernmental organization Pod střechou (Under the Roof in English), and Kamila Prchalová, the chairwoman of another local nongovernmental organization Cesta z města (The Way Out of Town in English), who are the main leaders of the Maria Stock revitalization process. Findings are also based on an analysis of additional materials published on the official website of the organization, ¹ which functions as a basis for communication with the public and as an instrument for remembering Maria Stock’s forgotten history.

Becoming and relationality in view of matters of concern and reversible black-boxing

Becoming and relationality are crucial in the building of memory. They are modes of ordering which involve practices of specification and experiments with what is and what might become a matter of memory (cf. Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 25), typical for negotiation on its possible forms. Just as the principles of nature cannot be explained without a laboratory and collections of artifacts stored in museums or archives (cf. Gould, 1989, Latour, 2005a), the building of memory cannot be clarified without highlighting the techniques, which depend on the whole infrastructure and types of media, including their relations and possibilities of a modal shift between them (cf. Bowker, 2008: 26–27). Analogically speaking, by marking and highlighting memorial sites, the Maria Stock Pathway creates the possibility for a shift between these sites. However, instead of a single place typical of a singular space–time dimension, the shift generates as many places as there are types of connections. This implies the existence of simultaneous multiple spaces which are constructed within the multiplicity of the possible relations between the sites of remembering. Instead of homogeneity, memorial landscape is the sphere of heterogeneity specific to distinct coexisting trajectories which are still under construction and contribute to the highlighting of reference frames in negotiation about the possible form of memory (cf. Massey, 2001; Massey et al., 1999; Pierce et al., 2011).

Thus, similarly to physics, where the reference frame consists of a coordinate system, each place can be seen as a particular point of intersection, which is in the center of negotiation about possible forms of co-presence between various groups of interests. The building of memory and subsequent remembering can thus be understood as the politics of what can be remembered, whether this is a matter of choice, or who or what enforces it. Both of these shifts suggest that the place and subject of a memory are the result of the constitution of interrelated heterogeneous elements, where connectivity and the methods of interrelatedness are more relevant in the formation of space and memory than a simple variable of distance or time (length or duration). A place or stop are not simply multiple representations of a single site; they are heterogeneous and fluid sites resulting from the Latourian notion of the “progressive composition of a common world” (Latour, 2004: 47). This is one of the specific features of hybridization, which are based on the assumption that reality is always the result of dynamic relations of heterogeneous assemblages involving both human and nonhuman actors, who contribute to the omnipresence and multiplicity of the objects of remembering in particular site (cf. Edensor, 1997; Van der Duim, 2007).

From this perspective, the building of the Maria Stock pathway as “progressive composition of memorial landscape” can be described by using two conceptual notions that are typical for Latour’s terminology. The first is the “matter of concern,” which is explained by Latour in opposition to the “matter of fact.” While matter of fact is a stable, unrelated singular object defined by primary qualities, a matter of concern is an unstable, multiple-relation thing that is formed and transformed in a process enabled by various forms of mediators, whose presence is registered by other actors or affects other things which have been gathered together. “Gatherings” lie at the core of the matter of concern, which expresses the engagement of various forms of elements (e.g. humans, non-humans, ideas, practices, etc.) in which things and issues, not simply facts, come into existence. All things are linked to the aggregation of mediators, which have the potential to provide some explanation of the context (cf. Latour, 1994, 2005b: 114).

Thus, a thing or a place serving as the intersection of various connections makes it possible to be described as black-boxed composition. The term “black box” was first used by Latour (1987) in his Science in Action. He borrowed it from cyberneticists, who use this word in situations where a machine or set of commands is too complex and therefore a “box” is drawn around it, allowing the system to be viewed only in terms of its input and output (Latour, 1987: 3). In this sense, he defines a black box as a complex network of enrolled actors all acting as one single automaton. It is a whole system of parts, whose composition can be studied as the gathering of various elements registered in one box. Analogically, as a click on a website means connecting it with other references situated in other websites using an existing network, “reversible black-boxing” is the reverse process which offers the potential to indicate the composition of each assemblage as an interconnected system of reference frames (cf. Latour, 1994: 36–39).

For the purposes of this article, this approach provides a potentiality to explore the building of memorial landscape in the context of the Maria Stock Pathway, which implies how specific places of remembering are transformed and exported into the form of a pathway. In respect to this principle, the place of remembering and memorial landscape cannot be simply conceptualized as a matter of historical or natural fact but as matters of concern which result as an aggregation of various mediators of gathering, affection, and negotiation about their possible ordering, which is related to three levels: (1) the delineation of the boundary between forgetting and remembering, (2) the formation of remembered objects, and (3) the possible direction of remembering. Their formation is explained more closely in the following two sections. The first of them describes the creation of a memorial landscape as a series of shifts from nonexistence to the public mode of being, within which the content of the pathway is inscribed into the route, initiating the multiplication of the former matter of concern. The second section focuses on the reversible black-boxing typical to the compression of different relations and space–time configurations contributing to the multiplicity of particular places of remembering.

The ordering of the pathway

Following the events of the gradual decline described briefly in the introduction, Maria Stock became very isolated. From the 1990s on, the site began to be increasingly more targeted by various vandals and thieves, who began to destroy the church. The situation culminated in September 2006, when a group of thieves cut a hole in the side door of the church during daylight hours and then climbed onto the roof of the building, where they began to saw off the tops of the church cupolas with a chainsaw in order to obtain copper and sell it at a metal recycling center (Figure 1). However, before the thieves completed the crime, one of them had fallen down from the roof. His associates transferred him hastily to the hospital in Karlovy Vary. From there, the seriously injured teenager was then airlifted to the University Hospital in Plzeň, where his life was saved.

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Figure 1.

The baroque church with destroyed copulas. The picture was made shortly after the devastation.

The event was widely discussed in Czech media, and it was the catalyst for many people to gain new and systematic interest in this forgotten pilgrimage site. Following this story, the site started to become more visible. This was primarily due to the activities of the nongovernmental organization, symptomatically named Under the Roof (Pod střechou in Czech), which significantly contributed to the revitalization of the pilgrimage tradition, especially in the context of two projects—Living Maria Stock (Živé Skoky in Czech) and the Maria Stock Pathway (Skokovská stezka in Czech).

For Latour (2005c), each object generated a different pattern of emotions, gathered a different assembly of relevant parties, offered new ways of achieving closure, and became not simply a matter of fact, but rather a matter of concern that was related to two interwoven questions: Who is concerned? What is considered? While the first question draws a sort of assemblage described in terms of a gathering, meeting, or council, the second question brings into light a new topic or issue that should be concerned as much by the procedure of detecting the relevant parties as with the methods of bringing the proof of what is to be debated (cf. Latour, 2005c, 15–16) to the center of debate. How Maria Stock was brought into debate and became a matter of concern, which activated different networks of participants, is illustrated in the following vignette from the interview with Jiří Schierl:

The devastation of the church was the breaking point.(. . .). So we started to organise a meeting of people who were well-known for their interest in Maria Stock, members of the local and regional municipalities and, of course, members of the canonry. Our organisation was like a mediator of rescue works, and because of my experience with cultural heritage I was very sad that this church had closed and was basically bricked up. (. . .). So we started thinking about possibilities of revitalising this place, and we have made the church open basically all year round. (. . .). And because the vice-president of our organization was a parish priest, he started to organise primarily spiritual activities, and the rest of our organisation focused on the idea of how to transform this place into an interesting site for tourists, which in the end would contribute to the promotion of our region. And while we were thinking about it, we founded the revitalisation of the lost religious tradition and [showed] that a pilgrimage is one of the ways it could be achieved.

It is possible to identify several steps involved in the recovery of the forgotten Maria Stock: the plundering of the church and the rooftop accident, which highlighted the church’s decrepit condition in the national media and the focus of the Pod střechou organization and the subsequent negotiation of a possible program for the revitalization and remembering of the place through its tourist and religious dimension, which culminated in the plan of building the pathway. The plundering of the church was converted into the project of the pathway, working as the basic instrument of the revitalization and remembering of the forgotten place, with expectations of the multiplication effect contributing to the general development of the neglected region. In this sense, the project focused on the two contradictory levels of tourism and the spiritual domain. In regards of tourism, the project emphasizes the importance of cultural and natural monuments, including the pilgrimage history of Maria Stock; the spiritual dimension proposed the pathway as a means of connection to the church in Maria Stock. The project is described explicitly in the project documentation as follows:

The main goals of the project are rescue and preservation, and the appropriate use of neglected and destroyed cultural monuments, especially the revitalisation of the pilgrimage site and the church in Maria Stock, including the use of natural riches and the general development of tourism in the region with a special emphasis on the development of marginal religious tourism. ²

With respect to these principles, the Pod střechou organization created a list of potential natural, cultural, and spiritual monuments in the region, arriving at a total of 35 places that could be highlighted in the route of the planned pathway. The places were divided into seven basic categories: (1) sacral architecture, (2) folk architecture, (3) technical monuments, (4) archeological monuments, (5) other monuments, (6) supplemental architecture, and (7) other attractions. Nevertheless, not all monuments could be made available according to the original plan. During the realization of the project, two serious problems arose that jeopardized the construction of the pathway and influenced the possible form of remembering. The first issue was related to the actual use of land in the region. The second was linked to finding an appropriate system of marking to eliminate confusion among designated tourist routes. The first problem is very well described by the chairman of the Pod střechou organization:

We had to go into fields and find where routes could be marked. It was a big problem, because there are many farms with vast pastures here and we found it was impossible to create a route of the pathway that would stay off the roads. Originally we wanted a pathway through nature, woods and fields, which was a great problem, because many of the original paths had disappeared, are not used, or are overgrown. Walking from one village to another without using the regular road (. . .) it’s virtually impossible.

Kamila Prchalová, the chairwoman of the organization Cesta z města, describes the situation as follows:

For example, when we prepared the materials for the abandoned village of Dřevohryzy, we were confronted with this problem. In the case of Dřevohryzy, all land has been sold to a local private farmer. The representatives of the town hall in Toužim asserted that the built-up land in Dřevohryzy was sold to him as punishment. If he wanted the lands in the surrounding areas of Dřevohryzy, he had to manage the built-up area of the abandoned village of Dřevohryzy as well. On the other hand, our argumentation was based on the explanation that all the built-up areas of Dřevohryzy should be accessible to the public, not fencing off the lands and transforming them into a vast pasture. The result is that it is impossible to visit this abandoned village and you can see it only from the local road.

This situation exists mainly because of the substantial changes that have occurred in the local demography since the end of the Second World War, including the expulsion of German residents from this part of the region. Since then the region has been transformed into a primarily agricultural area with vast pastures that are privately owned, rented, or available for rent (Figure 2). The region is becoming increasingly popular with farmers, who rely on European funds to manage the landscape as their main source of subsistence. For this reason, the landscape is now comprised of vast fenced-in pastures, which present a significant obstacle in accessing a variety of local monuments. Thus, many abandoned German villages included in the category of archeological monuments of defunct villages are not accessible because they are integral to the farmers’ lands.

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Figure 2.

(a) The pathway in pastures surrounded by electric fence as an obstacle in accessing of local monuments and (b) the electric fence which is obstacle in access to the area of defunct village Dřevohryzy.

The marking of the trail created yet another problem in the building of the Maria Stock Pathway. Marking a particular trail as a combination of educational and pilgrimage route is a very unusual practice in the Czech Republic. At present, there are standards for marking of tourist and educational trails, which have been established by the Club of Czech Tourists. The club uses a marking system consisting of four colors (red, blue, green, yellow), which are painted on trees, poles, or other suitable objects. The marks consist of horizontal colored stripes against a white square background. The sizes and symbols of the marks are specified in the club’s manual. Tourists are informed about overlaps between tourist trails and educational trails by specific text and corresponding pictograms determining the educational trails. The marking system of educational trails consists of cross-shaped green stripes. The Pod střechou organization studied the Club of Czech Tourists’ marking system when setting up the route for the Maria Stock pathway; however, the final plan was still inconsistent with the club’s original marking system (Figure 3):

It was logical that the pathway had to be marked in some way. Of course, we negotiated with the Club of Czech Tourists about this. They offered us the possibility of an educational trail. Nevertheless, we had a vision of a pilgrimage pathway and we wanted a one-direction marking system. Unfortunately, the methodology of the Czech tourists strictly prefers a two-way marking system. Finally, we had to withdraw from the collaboration. Moreover, we wanted the pathway to be something extraordinary, and the same applies to the marking system.

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Figure 3.

The confusion of marking systems between Czech Tourist and the pathway.

Yet, once a compromise with the Czech Tourists was reached, the combined marking systems of the Marian Stock pathway and the Czech Tourists began to grow confusing, and various complaints were made by many of the regular visitors to the region:

In the case of the tourist marking system, we have no opportunity to realize our vision. Therefore, we went our own way to overcome this impasse. The Marian tradition was the main source of inspiration for us, and we gave preference to the combination of blue and white colors in our marking system. Shortly afterwards, we found that our marking system is basically interchangeable with the system of the Club of Czech Tourists, and much confusion has occurred because of it.

Thus, the Pod střechou organization began to negotiate with the Czech Tourists again, ultimately finding a compromise regarding a marking system that respects the pilgrimage nature of the pathway by using the original design of a white star in a blue square field.

The result of the negotiations regarding the nature and form of the Maria Stock Pathway, which was gradually transformed from the project idea to its actual form, covers a distance of about 57 km and includes 71 places that differ in their quality and attributes. In its nature, the Maria Stock Pathway is a hybrid journey that mixes religious and tourist components to create a memorial landscape within which different individuals and groups of various interests can interpret and construct the past in different ways. Thus, the Maria Stock Pathway is a platform that offers referential frameworks for the creation of multiple forms of memory. In this regard, we must consider the question of how the multiple memory of the pathway is created with respect to its referential frameworks.

Remembering and reversible black-boxing

Three years later, on 1 July 2010, the opening ceremony of the Maria Stock Pathway and the beginning of the first pilgrimage season took place in Maria Stock. Since then, groups of pilgrims have taken the path from the monastery in Teplá to Maria Stock annually, and it is clear that a new tradition of the pilgrimage to the remembered Maria Stock has been successfully established. In this respect, questions arise regarding how the route of the pathway was designed, as well as how the kinds of places that are interconnected in its framework were selected and the logic that contributed to the selection of these particular places, which became integral parts of the pathway and are now highlighted and described in its official guidebook.

In this project, basic principles of highlighting were generally defined as focusing on places with a strong potential to emphasize the importance of the region’s natural and cultural heritage. Nevertheless, this very abstract criterion was in practice transformed into the main selection criterion, which was described as “interconnection” by the chairman of the Pod střechou organization.

When we started to think about it, we found there was a connection and suddenly everything started to interconnect very nicely, even though we did not know anything about it. Thus, we discovered that Maria Stock’s miraculous image was painted by an artist who lived in Toužim. The builder of the church was Johann Schmied, who came from Utvina. And so, the places started to be connected. The route of the pathway was based on the connection between these places.

According to Ryan, Foote, and Azaryahu (2016: 179) the creation of a landscape narrative is not simply writing a story about place, but rather rewriting the story to make connections between significant moments and places that would remain unconnected spatially and temporally. Nevertheless, the main question is, “On what basis is this interconnection realized?”

The Maria Stock Pathway constitutes a composite system of reference frames within which each object of potential remembering becomes a black box which offers possible connections to another objects situated in a different place and time. The miraculous image was painted by Johann Richter, who lived and worked in Toužim during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, in one of the centers of the Maria Stock Pathway. Similarly, the name of the builder of the church connected Maria Stock with another building designed and built by Johann Schmied; thus, Maria Stock is interconnected with other places in the region. From this perspective, the “interconnection” expresses the idea that every place is like a black box with hidden information about its interconnectedness with other sites in different time periods. This can be taken account of on the information panels situated in highlighted places in the official guide of the Maria Stock Pathway. If we were to regard the site of Maria Stock a black box, this interrelatedness is mentioned in the guide at stops 59 and 60:

[59] (. . .) Maria Stock was founded before 1517 and was the property of a noble farmhouse in Údrč. In the 17th century, Maria Stock began to be part of the property of the parish in Žlutice. The parson in Žlutice, Premonstratensian P. Johann Rick, Opraem, initiated the construction of the chapel in Maria Stock. The building of the chapel came to pass based on a revelation of the Virgin Mary by a local peasant called Adam Lienert in 1717. Lienert also paid for the painting of the image of Mary, which was painted by a painter named Richter as a copy of the image of Virgin the Helper from Passau in Germany. The prayers to the Virgin Mary were answered, and the local chapel became a place of pilgrimage (. . .). ³

[60] The construction of the church was carried out by Johann Schmied, a resident of Útvina. The building was built between 1736 and 1738, and the pilgrimage church was ordained in March 1738 in honour of the Church of the Annunciation. In 1740, Maria Stock became a part of the parish, with its centre in Teplá Monastery. In 1746, Maria Stock was returned to the parish in Žlutice. In 1749, Maria Stock became an independent parish managed by Premonstratensians from Teplá Monastery. The image of Virgin the Helper, also known as “from Passau” and later “from Stock,” was being worshipped by 40,000 pilgrims per year. ⁴

However, as far as this principle is concerned, the next important issue is the question whether the site can be defined as a black-boxed intersection point of the reference frames. Remembering means becoming visible. On the other hand, this task can be in conflict, especially in situation or in practice which emphasizes staying hidden and in secrecy. In such a situation, place is not defined by fixed intersections of heterogeneous relations, as illustrated at the aforementioned stops 59 and 60, but rather by the authoritative power, which is one of the reference frames. That is at the core of negotiation that generally contributes to the possible visibility of a remembered place.

This can be demonstrated by Stops 9 and 10. Stop 9 refers to the newest monastery in the Czech Republic, which was designed in a new and modern style by the world-famous architect John Pawson in Nový Dvůr. On the contrary, Stop 10, which is about a 1000 meters from the monastery, shows information about the abandoned village of Dolské Domky, which was destroyed after 1945. The Trappists, who are the residents of the monastery, do not agree with the inclusion of Stop 10 on the Pathway:

At present, the village Dolské domky is only forest land and is accessible only via the Trappists’ land. They do not share our enthusiasm and are against open access to the site of the village Dolské domky. Although there is a public pathway, it should remain closed for one simple reason — to ensure that no one has access to it. On one hand, I understand their position, because they need quiet, which is important for their monastic order. On the other hand, any discussion with them is very difficult. (. . .). When we installed a new panel with information about this defunct village, Dolské domky, we had to go to the monastery in Nový Dvůr to explain our aims. Eventually, we had to remove the panel because the monastery did not want tourists in their surroundings. I cannot understand this, because we tried to explain to them that the panel is about the abandoned village, not about their monastery. If the monastery was mentioned in the panel, it would actually be very good for them, because the visitors would read the information about the monastery and see images of the interior and would not climb over their fence to look at the interior of the monastery themselves. This happens because visitors have no idea what they might see in this new monastery. And this is the main reason why tourists in this place want to get closer to the monastery. Nevertheless, they don’t share our opinion and think that it is much better to live in secrecy.

The area of Stop 9 is not defined only by the building of monastery, but the territory which keeps the monastery and its residence in secrecy and which is in conflict with the possible visibility of Stop 10. Both of these stops are typical by their tendency to stabilize the place of remembering in relevant frames of reference, which determine every stop on the pathway by inscribed confusing boundaries around the center of remembering. The best example of this is probably Stop 14—Branišov’s Hill. Stop 14 is a point of assemblage that draws attention to different domains that are separated from each other by periodicity. In one part of the commentary, it is linked with the eighteenth century, which is in turn linked with the Second World War and the geological history of the region:

Branišov’s Hill, a dominant local landscape, is a part of Třebouň Hill, where an astronomical observatory was built by A. M. David at the end of the 18th century. ⁵ The hill is the highest point of the Toužim tableland, a cumulus igneous formation from the Tertiary Period composed of trachyandesites. At the top of the hill, we can find important geodetic points, the remains of a hiking cabin, and a gliders’ training centre from the Second World War. ⁶

In context of the Maria Stock Pathway, memories are created within various overlapping and still-existing space–time frames of reference. Just as indigenous Australians (e.g. Gill, 1998; Palmer, 2004) or Cree in Canada (e.g. Eades and Zheng, 2014) discovered the principles of their world in relation to landscape, tourists and pilgrims walking through the memorial landscape of the Maria Stock Pathway discover principles and events typical for the region that are at the core of remembering. A tourist nicknamed Bubinga pointed out the following on the Czech Tourism website while describing his walk on Branišov Hill:

I started my walk from the main road (. . .) and I climbed up a slight hill. First I walked past a small monument reminiscent of a soldier fallen during the First World War. One step further is a memorial tree, a grown oak, and after it the path continues to the left. It leads straight to the hill, first along a fence of a garden and after that along the edge of the forest . . . I am approaching the top of the hill. There is a rest area and the forest is replaced by glade . . . there is about 300 metres left to the final destination . . . The Branišov Hill (813 m.a.s) is the second peak, a double mountain together with the Třebouň Hill in the Tepelská highlands. An interesting fact about the hill is that at the turn of the 18th century the astronomical observatory of the famous astronomer and scientist Alois Martin David (1757–1836) was situated here. The building is no longer standing, but you can walk around its surroundings along the David’s educational trail, which is dedicated to the honor of this famous local resident. ⁷