A Loch Ness Monster made of farm machinery, in a cow pasture
Texas Nessie
South of Lampasas on U.S. 183, a rusted metal sea serpent rises and dips through a roadside pasture, as if Central Texas grew its own Loch Ness. It is welded from old farm machinery and positioned so the body appears to swim through the grass.
There is no ticket booth and no reason for it to exist except that someone decided their pasture needed a lake monster. In wet summers the grass swallows most of it and leaves only the head, which honestly improves the effect.
Drive-by only. Private property, seen from a fast highway; last widely reported around 2019 and sometimes hidden by tall grass. Do not stop unsafely or enter the pasture.
A Stonehenge replica and two Easter Island heads, by the river
Stonehenge II + the Moai
Outside Ingram, the Hill Country Arts Foundation keeps a roughly 90%-scale plaster Stonehenge beside the Guadalupe, flanked by two 13-foot Easter Island heads. It began as two neighbors messing around with a leftover slab and kept escalating.
It is the region’s biggest collision of unrelated ancient monuments, and it is free to walk up to.
A dead Icelandic sculptor’s highway yard, going back to weeds
Johann Eyfells’ sculpture yard
East of Fredericksburg on U.S. 290, a yard of rusting abstract metal forms looks like anonymous junk art from a passing car. It isn’t. The work is by Johann Eyfells, an Iceland-born sculptor who lived nearby and kept making art into his nineties; he died in 2019 and much of it stayed in the yard.
A real artist’s open-air body of work, slowly disappearing into weeds on one of the busiest tourist roads in the Hill Country.
Do not enter. Private property, posted No Trespassing. View only from the public road where it is safe.
Red eyes. Smoking nose. Bubbles from the other end.
Bully the Big Black Bull
A gigantic black bull stands on a trailer on the south side of U.S. 290 southeast of Fredericksburg, out front of the Yee Haw Ranch operation. Even standing still it is hard to miss.
The better version comes from field reports: when the mechanisms run, Bully has red LED eyes, blows smoke from the nose, and produces bubbles from the backside. A giant roadside bull would have qualified anyway. The bubble butt makes it unanimous.
A rare fiberglass giant that migrated from Maine to the wine road
Howard Huge, the migrating Muffler Man
Howard Huge is a fiberglass giant with a pillbox cap and bow tie standing east of Fredericksburg at a brewery on U.S. 290. His story starts nowhere near Texas: he spent years in storage in Maine before being sold, hauled south, and installed here in 2018.
His props keep changing — he has held a wine bottle, a wrench, a beer stein and a beer can. A 1960s-style advertising giant that migrated to the Hill Country and keeps switching jobs beats another tasting room.
A private water tank disguised as a gigantic beer can
The giant Lone Star can
Off I-10 on the northwest side of Boerne is what appears to be an enormous can of Lone Star beer. It is actually a private water-storage tank painted to look like one, sitting behind a fence and gate.
Almost the perfect deep-cut oddity: not an attraction, not a museum, not selling anything — just somebody who looked at a water tank and decided it should be beer.
Private residence. Enjoy it from the public road only.
A butcher-shop pig got orthodontia
The neon pig with braces
Boerne had a neon pig sign from the old Texas Meat Company. When a pediatric dental office took over the building, the pig survived — it just acquired a huge smiling mouth full of braces.
This is the correct way to reuse local signage. Do not remove the pig. Send the pig to the orthodontist.
A fake Old West town that started with a beer-can Christmas tree
Cartoon Saloon and Toonstone
It started when a cartoonist and his daughter built a Christmas tree out of empty Lone Star cans near Comfort. That apparently wasn’t enough. Cartoonist J.P. Rankin and a few friends kept going, adding an intentionally weathered saloon, a “Not So OK Corral,” and enough visual gags that the roadside cluster earned the nickname Toonstone.
It looks old. It is not old. It looks like a bar. It is not really a bar. It sells nothing and exists because somebody kept committing to the bit.
A Llano yard full of glass bottles on steel trees
Texas Tin Lizard bottle trees
On the east side of Llano, artist Kathleen Smith’s yard has long been filled with colored glass bottles mounted on metal branches, along with mosaics and assorted metal creatures — including a car sculpture and a mosaic rabbit. Much of it is easily visible from Highway 29.
A working folk-art yard, not a gift shop, right on the way through town.
View from the road. A private working studio — look, don’t wander in.
The town is Oatmeal, so naturally the water tower is oatmeal
The giant can of oatmeal
South of Bertram, near Burnet, is the tiny community of Oatmeal. It has leaned into the name hard enough to paint its ~20-foot water tower as a giant can of Three Minute oats.
The community still throws an annual Oatmeal Festival. It is near the northeastern edge of the Hill Country, but it is too stupidly perfect to leave off.
A dinosaur skeleton welded from discarded car parts
Bertram’s car-parts dinosaur
Behind a feed store on Highway 29 in Bertram, near Burnet, stands a full dinosaur skeleton welded from discarded automobile and bicycle parts, lawnmower pieces and pipe wrenches — the work of the late Garrett Wilkinson. It is named Anna Mae II; the original Anna Mae was reportedly sold off.
It sits on a trailer, so every so often the dinosaur leaves its Highway 29 nesting spot to turn up in a local parade.
A saddle-equipped cryptid beside a house made of soda bottles
Wimberley’s rideable jackalope
Wimberley’s Pioneer Town is already a deliberately fake Old West village. Its more important contribution here is a large jackalope fitted with a saddle — and, on the same site, a house built from an estimated 9,500 soda bottles, said to be the only all-soda-bottle house of its kind.
Fake frontier town plus rideable horned rabbit plus bottle architecture clears the bar easily.
Machu Picchu: 4,441 miles that way
The Hill Country ley-line signpost
On U.S. 290 west of Johnson City, a multi-arrow signpost points toward places like Sedona and Machu Picchu, at the driveway of a temple that claims a convergence of “ley lines.” It reportedly puts Sedona about 833 miles away and Machu Picchu 4,441.
Whether Earth energy respects U.S. highway mileage is outside the scope of this website.
