Les Trois-Châteaux du Eguisheim
15 September, 2017
The rain that came through yesterday had broken for the morning, though it was expected to make another pass through today. I woke up with the knee and ankle pain still pretty strong but wasn't prepared to let that limit our time at the castles. We headed down from Eguisheim toward Husseren-les-Châteaux to find the road up the hill. Along the way we stopped by a vineyard, with a nice little pull off spot under a tree. It is so beautiful here, so peaceful, with the rows of vines trailing off into the distance. We watched a tractor pulling harvested grapes from the fields to the road, likely heading back into the town. In a few months, those grapes will be Alsatian wine!
Up the hill we found a little parking area to leave the car and continue on by foot. I made my best along the trail. It wasn't a bad walk up at all and with a perfectly healthy leg it would be a quick trip, but I was hobbling and it was slow going. We eventually made it up to the first of the three ruins, Weckmund castle. Built in the mid 1200's, it is the youngest of the three castles. We climbed along the rocks and tucked into a hole in the wall to go inside the tower. It is truly amazing to stand inside these structures that- without care or maintenance- have stood abandoned for nearly a millennia and are still there. Maybe not complete, maybe there are parts of the walls scattered across the ground, and the roof is most definitely gone, but some semblance of the structure still stands. The oldest of the three - Wahlenbourg Castle - was built in 1006, over one thousand years ago!! I wonder how many of today's buildings would still be standing 1000 years from now were they to be completely abandoned and left without any upkeep. One thing is certain for me though – back home in Philadelphia, we marvel at historical sites from the 1700s, yet today we were standing in a castle that predates those by six centuries! The old historical buildings back home are closer to our current time than they are to the construction of these castles. And what makes it even more incredible is when you fathom that time distance, and how old these castles actually are... then realize they have nothing in age when compared to the pyramids or the ancient Greek ruins. And yet even still we stood at a burial site in Ireland that predates even those! The sense of time can shut down the mind when you try to comprehend it. Sure, it is one thing to view a timeline in a history book, but quite another thing to stand in the presence of these ancient structures. Again I try to imagine what the castle would have been like back in the 13th century, but again realize that there is no way people of the modern world can really fathom that life. We can really do nothing but stand in awe.
The next two were larger, more complex castles, but still both in heavy ruin. Sometimes though, I find the ruins to be just as beautiful as any upkept place. They don't have the glamour of a castle like Neuschwanstein, but they have a rustic charm of their own. They certainly speak more to the passage of time, and in many ways are a metaphor of life in general. The works are long lasting, but slowly crumbling away, and soon the world will have moved far enough along that you wouldn't know there was once a large stone castle there at all. Nature's reclamation of old structures is something I've always enjoyed, it's almost like one of nature's own art forms. These stone walls and towers stood here for centuries, but they are nothing compared to the timelessness of nature itself. And as we see the little plants taking foothold in the spaces between the stones, we can see nature's reclamation and timelessness at work before our eyes. That tiny stem with tiny leaf is embedded in the wall of a mighty fortress... but the roots will grow, destabilizing the stones themselves, and one day this tiny little stem with its tiny little leaf will send the walls of the towering castle to the ground. How can you not be in awe?
We passed through old courtyards and climbed the ancient stairways, at different points ducking into the walls themselves. There was one hole in the side wall that I couldn't get to with my knee, but Beth managed to climb into the complete darkness. From the edge of the walls we could see down into the valley with the little villages scattered about. We found Eguisheim and the church tower with its stork nest towering above the town, and from there traced the streets back to our hotel. Amazing how it all looked so tiny from up there!
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