Kappel lies at the edge of a plateau which is capped off in the northeast by a knoll of some 525 m above sea level known as the Hasensteil.

Between the flat hollow of the Kyrbach (brook) and a small gulley in Mörßberg (a long vanished village) towards Kludenbach, this plateau forms a ridge that presents itself especially prominently as a spur at the church hill.

In 1091, Kappel had its first documentary mention in a document from Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor in which he donated holdings in the Hunsrück to the High Foundation in Speyer.

The placename, the location and Roman archaeological finds in and around Kappel, however, make it clear that the village must be much older, even if there is no proof of continuous habitation through all that time.

Right near the staggered intersection of Kastellauner Straße and Kirchberger Straße – a spot known as the Dreispitz (“three-point” or “tricorne”) – lies the village centre with the old Evangelical church from 1747 (as it says on the iron brackets on the tower) with mediaeval wall components, the bakehouse (called the Backes, a variant of the usual German word Backhaus) with its upper floor that housed the Catholic school's school room and teacher's dwelling until 1849, and two of the village's biggest homesteads with a guest parlour and guestrooms to let.

Baptist, the farmhand (possibly the only one in the village in those days) at the homestead zur Krone, now given up as an agricultural concern but now restored as the municipality's Heimathaus (local museum), rode and worked with a horse and a draught ox, while most small farmers did the same with their dairy cows.

The Evangelical congregation, nowadays numbering 232, was autonomous and parochially tied to Leideneck beginning in 1852, which had its own church, but no rectory.

As well, there were a postal coach station in the Lower Village on what is now called Zeller Straße and a third inn on Waldgasse (“Forest Lane”).

It had a fire station, a sugar beet syrup kitchen, a storage facility for large pieces of equipment used to steam, freeze and wash potatoes and even extra dwelling space upstairs for ethnic German refugees driven out of Germany's former eastern territories after the Second World War.

Work on a newer municipal centre began in 1965 because the citizens of Kappel and the local clubs wanted a venue big enough for family celebrations and events.

Within Kappel's municipal limits, or at them, is a whole series of former village sites that were forsaken even by the Middle Ages, although their names live on, now applied to the rural cadastral areas that are left where the villages once stood: Kyr, Kyrweiler (in older sources also called Kerweiler), Mörßberg, Rittelhausen, Langerode, Selze and Beinhausen.

[1] The German blazon reads: Über Blau-Gold geschachteltem Schildfuß in Silber eine schwarze Kapelle.

The municipality's arms might in English heraldic language be described thus: A base countercompony azure and Or above which argent a chapel sable.

The following are listed buildings or sites in Rhineland-Palatinate’s Directory of Cultural Monuments:[5] The Evangelical church’s interior decoration is plain in the Reformed tradition, and its original organ from 1900 has been preserved.

The local form is at left, followed by Standard High German in the middle with an English translation rightmost: „Kimmste noh Kappel, do wohnt de Pere Prappel, dä hot’n Gaul, dä scheißt der en Appel uf et Maul.“ „Kommst du nach Kappel, da wohnt der Peter Prappel, der hat ein Pferd, das gibt dir einen Apfel – seinen Stuhlgang – auf den Mund.“ “Are you coming to Kappel, there lives Peter Prappel, who has a horse, that will shit you an appleonto your mouth.” The village lies at the crossing of two important roads: the road from the Rhine, Koblenz/Boppard to Trier, the one that was later called the Hunsrückhöhenstraße (Bundesstraße 327), and the road from Kirn on the river Nahe by way of Kirchberg to the Moselle and Zell (Bundesstraße 421).

From the sometimes painful treatment supposedly came the German word piesacken (a verb meaning “badger”), but this is likely folk etymology.