Leienkaul is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Cochem-Zell district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Kaisersesch, whose seat is in the like-named town. Geography The municipality lies in the Eifel just southeast of Laubach. Leienkaul's elevation is 500 m above sea level. History Although the Maria Martental Monastery in the municipality is believed to have been founded about 1141 by the Springiersbach Monastery, soon thereafter becoming an important pilgrimage site, Leienkaul is quite a new settlement as places in this part of Germany go. It was founded only in the late 18th century by slate miners and their families who wanted to live near the pits where they earned their livelihood. These were found on the east side of the Kaulenbach (brook) and in the upper reaches of the Sesterbach within neighbouring Laubach's municipal limits. The new village's name was drawn from one used for a rural cadastral area, Auf den Leyenkaeulen, which comes from the early Germanic word Lei (also spelt Lay or Lai), meaning “stone” or “crag” and the dialectal word Kaul for “mine” or “pit”. Work in the pits was for those living in the nearby villages the main source of income. Soil conditions in Müllenbach and Laubach were particularly bad for crop raising and livestock raising. Stony and even craggy land with little deep soil made for very hard work and scant harvests, which could not feed local families, which tended to be big. Agriculture thus became quite secondary and was considered mainly women's and young children's work. The men and older boys, meanwhile, worked twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, in the slate pits, and after each shift, they went to work in the fields as well. The state of the population's general health at that time was beyond desolate. Medical help was very uncommon through all this poverty and extraordinarily hard and dangerous work, leading to a life expectancy among adults of roughly 50 to 60 years and an infant mortality rate of 40% right up to the age of five. Many young people also died of tuberculosis. So went life here when the first slate miner built himself a house near the “Colonia” pit on the Kaulenbach. Many others followed his example: men from Müllenbach, Laubach and other nearby villages, and miners from the Moselle valley and the