Schachten (singul.) are ancient areas of pasture in the Bavarian Forest in Germany, some of which are still used today. thumb|The Ruckowitzschachten at [[Rukowitzberg. In the background are the mountains of Großer Arber and Zwercheck]]
Schachten (singul.) are ancient areas of pasture in the Bavarian Forest in Germany, some of which are still used today. thumb|The Ruckowitzschachten at [[Rukowitzberg. In the background are the mountains of Großer Arber and Zwercheck]]
== Description == Similar to the alms or alpine pastures of the Alps, Schachten are treeless forest meadows. These open areas, often covering several hectares, were used by the herdsmen as places to stay for the night and for halts on a journey. Individual trees were left in place on these meadows to provide shady resting places for the animals. These isolated trees grew, unsheltered and are often gnarled by wind and weather. These forest clearings are especially interesting because they are the only open areas in these huge forests and often have good views. In the north of the Bavarian Forest they are often just called Wiesen ("meadows"), which in the region between the mountains of Großer Falkenstein and Großer Rachel they are exclusively referred to as Schachten; further south and southeast they are called Plätze.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).