The best MTB trails around Masłów

Beach, toilets, restaurants> Excellent refreshment stop, beautiful beach. Crowded on warm days.

The symbolic grave of Scout Wojtek Szczepaniak is located in the forest at Kielce's Forest Stadium. It is best reached from the intersection of Kusocińskiego and Na Stadion Streets. A blue signpost marks the spot. Seventeen-year-old Wojtek Szczepaniak, a Scout named "Zawiszak" from the Grey Ranks Battalion, was captured by the Germans in August 1944 while carrying a report to Daleszyce on his bicycle. Tortured by the Gestapo in Kielce, he remained steadfast after several weeks of interrogation. He was shot on September 21, 1944, in the forest on the slope of Pierścienica Mountain, where his symbolic grave stands today. His grave is located at the Partisan Cemetery.

An interesting reserve. There is still a quarry here (Tumlin sandstone is extracted here), and in the reserve you can see the remains of pagan circles from the 8th and 9th centuries. The most important and most obvious attraction here is the chapel of the Transfiguration of the Lord from 1850, which replaced the earlier, wooden one. The first one was supposedly built to celebrate the repulse of the Swedish army, but this may be just a legend.

Exposed fragment of the wall of a former quarry created as a result of extraction of Ordovician quartz sandstones. These rocks were already exploited in the interwar period and after World War II, primarily for the production of paving stones, which were used to pave, among others, a part of Wojska Polskiego Street and Plac Defilad in Warsaw.

Rest, good food.

At the Artists' Square in Kielce there is a monument to the wild boar "Kiełek", which refers to the legend of the founding of Kielce. Around the monument, there are plaques with bas-reliefs that refer to this legend. These boards sort of "tell" it.

The former quarry and the surrounding forest area have been protected since 1981 as the "Biesak-Białogon" nature reserve. The sandstones quarried here were used to produce paving stones that decorated many streets in Kielce. Thanks to mining works, a profile of rocks of marine origin was uncovered, representing two periods in the history of the Earth: Cambrian and Ordovician. Fossilized deposits of the Cambrian sea, over 500 million years old, are the oldest rocks visible in the reserve. Ordovician sandstones are younger than them and are approximately 480 million years old. They include inserts of greenish, soft rocks called bentonites - fossilized marine sediment mixed with volcanic ash. In the northern wall of the quarry there is also a fragment of the profile in which older (Cambrian) rocks lie on younger (Ordovician) rocks. This, in turn, is a record of ancient orogenic movements that led to the shift and inversion of the arrangement of rock layers. The landscape value of the reserve is emphasized by a small lake filling the excavation of a former quarry.

"Jeziorko Kamionka" - a former quarry flooded with water, towering spruce and pine trees reflecting on the surface, creating an extraordinary, somewhat mysterious atmosphere. "Kamionka" is hidden among the forests growing on the low slopes of the Posłowice Range of the Świętokrzyskie Mountains. Just above the water surface, also in the northern wall, there is a thin layer of bentonite - a rock formed in the sea from volcanic sediments. This is evidence that about 480 million years ago, there were active volcanoes in the area of the sea basin where the sandstones visible today were formed. And here's an interesting fact not only for "wine drinkers" - Bentonite has strong adsorption properties, it is an effective agent for clarifying wine.