Knights to remember
Lizzie Enfield manages to keep her head – unlike St Alban – in the sumptuous castles and vineyards of the ravishing Rhineland...
The Rhineland is the stuff of school history lessons. Most people can reel off a few facts and dates: a key industrial region, a natural barrier to neighbour and rival France and, under the Treaty of Versailles, a demilitarised zone into which Hitler defiantly marched troops in 1936.
But the meanders of the Rhine and Moselle rivers, the fairytale castles, Romanesque cathedrals, historic cities, vineyards and unspoiled forests and mountains remain relatively undiscovered.
One of the first to capture the romance of the area was the English landscape artist J.M.W. Turner, who travelled here in 1817, a year after its creation (before that it was the independent Grand Duchy of Hesse). From one of the many hiking trails that criss-cross the Moselle Valley and Hunsruck Mountains, I looked down on one of the scenes he captured – the ruins of Klosterstuben, a 12th century monastery.
Its vaulted window arches now grace the labels of rieslings from Bremmer Calmont Vineyard, the steepest in Europe. This is Germany’s largest wineproducing region and opportunities for sampling are everywhere: in vineyards, at one of the many wine houses or at festivals. I arrived in Mainz and to a wine garden heaving with people sampling the 100 or so varieties produced in the area.
But wind the clock back a few hundred years further and this was a land of knights and kings whose homes were their castles. Take the magnificent Eltz Castle, on a rock above a forest, a mass of turrets and towers. The property has been in the same family for 850 years. The present Count Eltz walked me around the building which contains many original furnishings, including a small flight of stairs – needed to climb into a large bed.
The castle has world-class paintings, an impressive treasury and armoury, which includes cannon ‘samples’ – mini-guns used by travelling salesmen to tempt latter-day counts into buying bigger ones. At the Knights Hall, where the three branches of the family who live here now meet up, carved jesters’ masks denote free speech, and a plaster ‘rose of silence’ over the exit is a reminder that what goes on in the Knights Hall stays in the Knights Hall. A short cruise along the Rhine between Mainz and Koblenz provided many opportunities for further castle-spotting. I disembarked at Bacharach and headed for the restored Castle Reichenstein, which operates as a museum, restaurant and hotel.
After dinner, I lay in bed looking out at its crenellated towers. Reichenstein is a ‘defender’ castle complete with a working drawbridge and portcullis.
The Rhine has always been of strategic importance where external forces, from enemy barbarians to Allied troops, could be held back. A cable-car over the river from Koblenz takes you up to the Ehrenbreitstein Fortress.
Most of what visitors see now was built by Prussian forces in the early 19th century to prevent repeated attacks by the French. It ’s a great place from which to admire the valley and down to Koblenz where a vast equestrian statue of Emperor Wilhelm I presides over the spot where the Moselle joins the Rhine.
Mosey on down the Moselle and you eventually end up in Trier, Germany’s oldest city. Founded in the 4th century BC and later conquered by the Romans, it has Roman remains including the Porta Negra (black gate), Imperial Baths, basilica and an amphitheatre.
Trier may be the oldest city, but Mainz is the capital of the region.
Its Romanesque cathedral is impressive but the real gem is the Gothic church of St Stephen, restored after a Second World War bombing and now glowing with ethereal blue light from the magnificent Chagall stained-glass windows. The artist, a Russian Jew who spent much of his life in France, was asked to design the windows as a sign of Jewish/ Christian understanding – apt for a city which, during the Middle Ages, was home to the largest Jewish community in the German-speaking world.
The nearby Landes Museum displays the oldest still-readable Jewish tombstone in Europe, from 1049, and a collection of Renaissance paintings.
Mainz was also home to moveable type-meister, Johannes Gutenberg, and four narrow walls outside the eponymous museum display original plates used in his revolutionary printing press. Its other famous resident was St Alban. Beheaded by Vandals while praying, he is said to have picked his head up and carried it four miles to his final resting place.
I tried to keep mine as I walked across the new Geierlay rope suspension bridge. The longest in Germany, it connects to a leg of the 250-mile Saar-HunsruckSteig hiking trails.
My final base was Weinhaus Halfenstube in the pretty hamlet of Senheim-Senhals.
From here I could see an ochrecoloured church reflected in the water, and I reflected that my school history lessons did nothing to prepare me for the Rhineland’s mix of beauty and culture. Like many tourists I learned the facts, but the facts rarely tell the whole story and this region has plenty of them waiting to be discovered.