Trying to find a town called Hayden in Germany

cooeedownunder

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I have been trying to locate a town that has been called Hayden in at least the late 1600s.

The only reference I have is from a biography that states that at a distance of six miles from Ahlden Castle, along a road to the west, there is a a stone bridge on the way to Hayden which marked six miles from the castle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahlden_Castle

I can't find any town named Hayden in my google searches or looking west to the castle on any maps and wonder if that is an English name for a German town?
 

Old Hack

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Have you considered alternate spellings?
 

benbenberi

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"Hayden," or a variant spelling, may be a local place name but not a town.

"Heide" is German for heath or moorland, & a form of it "heiden" is an adjective (e.g. "heidenroslein," as in the Goethe poem/Schubert song, = heather rose).
"Heiden" ia also German for "heathen", i.e. pagan.
 

Max Vaehling

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"Hayden," or a variant spelling, may be a local place name but not a town.

"Heide" is German for heath or moorland, & a form of it "heiden" is an adjective (e.g. "heidenroslein," as in the Goethe poem/Schubert song, = heather rose).

Incidentally, that's just where Ahlden is located - right in the Lüneburger Heide, a major area in Northern Germany. So there were probably dozens of places referencing that in their name around there. Ahlden itself apparently had a "Heidberg" (heath hill). There's an old source online describing the area, from 1654, Topographia Braunschweig Lüneburg that mentions Ahlden (and the Heidberg) but doesn't have any reference to Hayden I could find. It does, however, mention Hedemünden, Heyna and Haddenberg. but those are long stretches from Hayden and while I'm at it, I may as well mention Hardenberg (you sure that's a Y? Could have been mistaken from am r...) and, of course, Hameln..

Looking West from the castle, though, there's a place called Hoya. Again a major stretch but at least this is a major place - not big but somewhat prominent at the time, according to the Topographia - and in the right direction. (There's a map here.)

It's also possible that our source references the Heide itself and Hayden was just a weird English way of writing it, but the Heide is all around Ahlden, so it's not really a direction. Still, it's entirely possible that it meant "into the Heide to the West" or something.

Ah, old maps and history riddles. It's worse than Sudoku and drugs combined...
 

cooeedownunder

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Thank you all.

I really love that map.

There is a place on that map, three towns away that appears to start with a H, on the road going north west from Alden but I can't read the name of any of those towns or match them up with the town list.
 

Max Vaehling

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Yeah, I couldn't read that, either. But according to Google Maps, it's Hedern.

Thinking about it, that (in German, especially Northern German) is pronounced similarly to Hayden (in English), if you do it just right. Any chance the name in your source was based on aural relaying?
 
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