Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 8/Up the Moselle - Part 3
UP THE MOSELLE.
PART III.
After climbing over the sites of both the castles, which are accessible by a hewn stair from the church, we return to take the road up the valley which leads in the direction of the Moselle. Idar is passed,—a great manufactory of agates. In Idar and Oberstein are said to live one hundred goldsmiths, engaged in setting these stones, which science has now learned to dye. Beyond Idar we see a shining rock on the top of a wooded ridge, seemingly easy of access by a straight up-hill bridle-road. Not meeting a creature to ask the way, it appears to us safer to take the main road, which winds most circuitously up a long gorge. We are rewarded, however, by passing through woods of beech, whose enormous boles are worthy of a virgin American forest. At length the landmark of the shining rock is reached, and we are at the top of the Hunsrücken, or Ridge of the Huns, a long hog’s-backed wooded hill, or rather series of ridges, with a more or less flat top, which extends up from the Rhine between the Nahe and the Moselle, and is about 2000 feet high. This country is strangely wild and solitary. At one of the loneliest spots there stand in the road three hinds of the red deer, looking at us. They withdraw to about a hundred yards in the wood, and stand still again, looking very grand, and, in the half-light, almost spectral.
On descending from the main ridges, we see a most solitary castle in a most solitary moor. We can get no information from the peasants but that it is called Balduinenhof, or the Court of Baldwin, probably having been erected by a sturdy archbishop of Treves of that name.
Some charcoal-burners here show a shorter way, so we quit the main road and skirt an oak forest, as grand and antique-looking as the beech forest we had passed in the morning. As the autumn sun sets gloriously, we are aware of the hollow in which the Moselle runs, light upon a gorge which leads down to it, and arrive at Berncastel in the dark. The day’s walk may have amounted to eighteen or twenty miles, but a straight course for the shining rock would have saved two or three of these.
We knew Berncastel before, as represented in one of Harding’s views. But that Berncastel exists no longer. Like Trarbach, and several other places on the Moselle, it was partly burnt down in 1857, by some strange fatality. In the cases both of Berncastel and Trarbach the picturesque frontage of the towns on the side of the Moselle is no more. Any paintings which have been made from them, as subjects, would now acquire a double value, for they would be as portraits of the dead. From Berncastel it is but a step to Trarbach across the neck of the hill, though the steamer takes some time to get there in following the devious course of the Moselle.
Trarbach lies at the mouth of one of those long, wooded, winding gorges which lead down to the Moselle from the table-land. At present it is a very uninviting place, as the best inn stands in a close street. But on the other side of the river appears a little house with “Hotel Klaus” in large letters upon it. So we cross in the huge ferry-boat and enter it. There is a beautiful view, from the windows, of the river, with the hills over Trarbach, and the Castle of Trarbach crowning the nearest of these. The “Hotel Klaus” is situated in Traben, a corruption of the Latin word “Taberna.” It was manifestly the half-way station between Trêves and Coblentz in the Roman times. In the Palatinate we find the word Taberna corrupted into Zabern, or Saverne. Traben still exhibits some of the most curious old houses to be found anywhere on the Moselle, which is saying much, as all the unburnt towns on the Moselle abound in curious old houses. When fortifications limited the area of towns, it seems that all the decorative energies of the inhabitants were expended on putting as much ornament in a narrow compass as possible. The houses at Traben—amongst which is most conspicuous the old Town-hall—are dark, dingy, and filthy; but glory in every possible interlacing of rafters and arabesque ornamentation. Klaus’s Hotel is a favourite abode of the Düsseldorf artists; and it is a most friendly little inn, where the family appear to do all in their power to please the palates, secure the comforts, and save the pockets of their guests. There is a sociable common breakfast, dinner, and supper at regular hours. The Moselle wine is abundant and good. In our short stay we saw specimens of the prosaic and poetic intoxication: the former in the persons of two Englishmen who had been indulging in alcohol previously on board the steamer; the latter in the person of a goodly vine-grower of the neighbourhood, a well-to-do peasant, but clad in simple blouse, with a face the type for an artist. He was made a butt of by the naughty brethren of Düsseldorf, one of whom passed himself off upon him as a railway surveyor, and took his opinion with the gravest face on the different merits of problematical lines. Long may it be before the Moselle is defiled with tunnels and cuttings, and ceases to be a haunt for artists! Behind Traben is the elevation which bears the name of Mont Royal, where Louis XIV. made a great camp at great cost, which he was obliged to abandon at the peace of Ryswick. And Trarbach is historically famous, as having been occupied by Marlborough in the campaign of Blenheim. The valley behind Trarbach is rich in magnificent rock and wood scenery, as are also its two branches, which lose themselves in the upland. September is surely the time to see the Moselle. The air is still, the sun is but lukewarm, the lights are exquisite, the colours of the foliage range through every variety of green, and yellow, and pink, and russet, and brown. The only drawback is the shortness of the days, still shorter in the depth of the gorge, from which the hills shut out the last smiles of the sun. It is not so true to say that Nature is always beautiful, as that Nature can be beautiful at all seasons. On grey, foggy, overcast days, whether in summer or winter, Nature’s beauty is asleep. But to the lover of Nature even midwinter itself invests the country with greater attractions than the town. What ball-room diamonds or hanging lustres can vie with the spiculæ of hoar-frost, when the living light of the morning sun glistens through them!
The steamer which plies between Trêves and Coblentz performs the down voyage in one day, the up voyage in two. We get on board to go down the river about midday. The effect of the quiet course is curious and novel from the perpetual scene-shifting, as there are none of the long reaches of the Rhine. Yet the scenes have a certain sameness: long vine-mantled hills; little towns, with each its castle, or perhaps its ruined convent above it; gabled and fantastic houses; frowning rocks, some dark, some red, some motley, as composed of intruded igneous rocks, or flat-lying or slightly dislocated sandstone. The red rocks contrast best with the green vines. The company on board is variously composed, but there happen to be no English. There are priests from Trêves, with shovel-hats and long cloaks; peasants from the banks with pretty costumes, among which a close cap of gilt filagree and a great silver-gilt bodkin stuck behind are conspicuous. There is one unfortunate German lady with no protector, and herself obliged to protect six children, mostly healthy boys. These are ever and anon trying to commit suicide, either by leaning over the river, or balancing themselves over the opening to the engines. During the progress of the table-d’hôte in the cabin the halest of these boys comes tumbling down the cabin-stairs, with his head resounding on the floor. He rubs the place to show that no harm is done, except to his mother’s feelings. That table-d’hôte in the cabin is a mistake, and those who wish to see the scenery will do well to dine à la carte above. The wind upon deck is the excuse offered to remonstrants.
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Traben, on the Moselle.
There is a painter on deck, sketching the clergy and laity, who appear half-conscious and not displeased at the compliment, while another is trying to get memoranda of the shapes of the hills and castles, and convents, and bits of old walls, and quaint churches and quainter houses which pass as in a dream. One of the grandest parts is close to Alf, where a valley opens, which leads to the baths of Bertrich and the wilder scenery of the Eifel. But Cochem is apparently the cynosure of the Moselle. It is a place for which Nature has done her best, and mediæval art its best also, to make it a quarry of gems for modern painters. As the steamer does not stop at the stations, but the passengers who wish to be set down must hail a boat, and the stations are much like one another, we are insensibly carried past Brodenbach, where we intended to alight, and disembarked at Aiken, just beyond. In consequence of asking there of the parish priest, the direction of the humble inn, we pass the evening with him at his most hospitable bachelor establishment. He is great in the antiquities of the Moselle, and in the produce of his own vineyard, both white and red. In the morning he has to say mass at Brodenbach, and offers to conduct us thither, and put us on the way to the Castle of Ehrenburg, the chief sight of these parts.
The village of Ehrenburg is shrouded in a luminous mist. We come upon an exquisite picture. The rays of the morning sun are piercing the mist from the left, and strongly illuminating a vine which hangs on an old house in the foreground, and the golden moss on a cottage in the middle distance; to the right is a quaint old bridge, some high trees and a stream; above all appears high up, as if suspended, the ghost of a great castle—a veritable castle in the air. A winding way conducts presently to it, and we are in the midst of the extensive remains of the Castle of Ehrenburg. It is shown by an old man who lives there in a kind of house built at the bottom of a spacious winding vault which leads up by an inclined plane to the interior of the hold.
The view from the chief tower is very comprehensive: in the distance, beyond the Moselle, appear the volcanic summits of the Eifel, bringing to mind the strange country of the Puy de Dome, in France. This is one of the castles which belonged to that Sickingen who figured in the Reformation period. The grand and romantic loneliness of its site is similar to that of another castle of the same family, hidden away in a woody basin, near the village of Sauerthal, in the country behind Caub, on the Rhine, and the descendant of whose owner is still said to be living as a humble peasant in a farm on the mountain.
From Ehrenburg we strike across the upland, and in a pleasant walk of about seven miles cross the Hunsrücken, a spur of which here forms the narrow neck of land which divides the rest of the Moselle from the Rhine. A winding path, shaded with beech, leads down on hydropathic Boppard. A knapsack properly stored, and a pool in a mountain stream, supply all the needs of a toilette after the walk. At Boppard we come again on the railway and the Rhine steamer, the nineteenth century, and respectability, with the intention of taking another walk in the still unsophisticated Moselle country at the first opportunity.