Beuren 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 Ulmen, whose seat is in the like-named town. Geography Beuren, which is found on the heights above the Moselle, lies in the Vordereifel (“Further Eifel” – not to be confused with the Verbandsgemeinde of Vordereifel, which is in the Mayen-Koblenz district), only 5 km upstream from Bremm on the Moselle. The municipality has an elevation of roughly 400 m above sea level and an area of roughly 1 000 ha. There are about 500 inhabitants. Name There are 15 places in Germany named Beuren, all of which likely draw their names from German words such as bauen (“raise”, “cultivate”), bebauen (“farm” in the verbal meaning) and Bauern (“peasants”, “farmers”). History About the year 1920 during building excavation work, a whole underground maze of passageways some 1.8 m high with peaked ceilings, well preserved inside a cliff, was unearthed. The walls showed no trace of any work done with the customary striking tools, but rather they had been painstakingly hewn out of the stone with thrusting tools. Here and there, narrow shafts leading up to the surface had been bored, through which spoil might have been lifted in leather sacks. The apparent use of thrusting tools has given rise to the supposition that this maze of tunnels might have been the Romans’ work. Evidence of a Roman presence has also come to light at the municipality's “castle”. This complex is known as such (Burg in German) on the assumption that something resembling a castle must once have stood there. All that can be seen nowadays is a ring-shaped earthen wall thirty metres across and one metre high. Nevertheless, it was here that potsherds of Roman origin were found during drainage works. Whether this ring was the wall around a Roman watchtower – a burgus to use the word that the Romans borrowed from Germanic speech – or the bank of a Roman pond in a garden complex with a castle on the hillock next to it is unknown. However, a Roman origin seems to be beyond doubt. Also lending weight to the proposition that there was a Roman presence in what is now Beuren is a find made a few hundred metres from the “castle”, the remnants of a Roman road.