Ellinghorst, Gladbeck — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in Ellinghorst?

Three entries on Gladbeck's monument register stand in Ellinghorst. St. Elisabeth was built on Maria-Theresien-Straße between 1959 and 1961 to a design by Otto Spengler, and Bishop Franz Hengsbach consecrated it on 7 January 1961, though the parish gave the building up in 2010 and the fashion label Grubenhelden bought it in 2019. The church itself joined the register on 27 January 2014.

Two farmsteads were listed before 1990. The Lökenshof at Durchholzstraße 22 keeps a beam inscription of 1491 and reaches back to a twelfth-century first mention, while the Vöinghof stands at Hornstraße 25. The Gräberfeld von Gladbeck lies on a rise inside the same quarter, and the Halde Ellinghorst closes its southern edge.

What is the history of Ellinghorst?

Ellinghorst carries no charter year, but its ground has been dated twice over. The name pairs the old words for alder and copse, and the Lökenshof on Durchholzstraße is documented from the twelfth century, with a dated beam from 1491. Deeper time arrived in 1936.

Farmland here was released that year for a miners' colony, a drainage trench turned up potsherds and bone, and excavation opened two stretches of a Late Bronze Age cemetery running at least 300 metres. Diggers logged 215 find complexes, among them 203 burials, two ring ditches and one keyhole-shaped enclosure, and the original grave count is put above 400. The finds went to the municipal museum at Schloss Wittringen, about two kilometres east and outside the quarter.

The Second World War left its own layer, since a forced-labour camp stood in Ellinghorst and bunkers survive on the tip ground, some of them still unlocked.

Where is Ellinghorst?

Ellinghorst occupies the western corner of Gladbeck, with the Bottrop city boundary on one side and the A 2 running along the south. The Halde Ellinghorst fills that southern strip, a former municipal tip that took the town's refuse from the 1950s to the mid-1970s and has been a nature reserve since 2001. The heap rises about six metres.

Across the motorway lies the Halde Rheinbaben, a second reserve that belongs to Gladbeck but not to this quarter, and seepage from the western slope feeds a brook that drains south into the Boye. Hollows on the plateau hold standing water and serve as spawning pools for the natterjack toad, and the reserve's roughly 22 hectares are closed to walkers.