Dichtelbach is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Rhein-Hunsrück-Kreis (district) in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Rheinböllen, whose seat is in the like-named town.
The municipality lies in the eastern Hunsrück between the Autobahn A 61 and the Binger Wald (forest). The village lies on the old Roman road, the so-called Via Ausonia (or Ausoniusstraße in German), which led from Trier to Bacharach. The municipality’s namesake is a brook called the Dichtelbach, which empties into the Guldenbach between Rheinböllen’s main centre and its outlying centre of Rheinböllerhütte. The brook’s name was originally Dadilebach, which meant “Firebrook”, a reference to the many charcoal kilns in the woods along its course.
The village’s namesake brook, the Dichtelbach, had its first documentary mention on 6 November 996, but it was another 351 years before a documentary mention that clearly…