St. Oswald's Chapel (Höllental)

St. Oswald’s Chapel (German: St. Oswald-Kapelle) lies in the Höllental in the High Black Forest, at its eastern end near the Ravenna Bridge.

Administratively it lies in the civil parish of Steig in the municipality of Breitnau in the county of Breisgau-Hochschwarzwald in the German state of Baden-Württemberg.

The chapel was consecrated in 1148 by Bishop Hermann I of Konstanz as a proprietary church of the lords of Falkenstein (after their castle in the Höllental valley.

[1] Today it is also suspected, however that the settlement had been established on the upland and that there had been a parish church in Breitnau before St. Oswald was founded.

Attempts to abandon the "old dive" (alte Spelunke) or "most superfluous of all chapels" (entbehrlichste unter allen Kapellen), were ended in 1812 by the grand ducal government in Karlsruhe.

[3] The chapel holds up to 250 people and is used for weddings, patron saint festivals and at Christmas (by the Hofgut Sternen).

This includes a copy of the crucifix on the north side of the nave, which had been carved in 1617 by Georg Hauser (died around 1653) from the eponymous woodcarving guild.

It is one of the most important surviving examples in the region of the Upper Rhine School in the early sixteenth century."