[8] This is no doubt a slip for Struden, as Stockerau lies far further down the river, about seventy miles nearer Vienna, on a branch of it some distance from the main stream.
[9] It is about eight English miles.
CHAPTER VI
THE WACHAU
“’Mid castled crags and swirling stream,
’Mid green-clad vineyard hills,
Where History and Legend dream,
My heart with beauty thrills.”
From the German
The Wachau has come to be regarded as one of the show places of the Danube, and very beautiful it is, with its narrow gorge through which the great river finds its way, its wooded mountains, its crag-perched ruins, its quaint old towns and villages, and its numerous vineyards lining the rocky mountain sides. It was “discovered” not many years since by one Augustin Weigl, and its accessibility from Vienna has served to make it the most popular portion of the beautiful river. Many as are its attractions, there are stretches further up the river—notably that from Grein to Persenbeug—that can vie with it in attractiveness, and there are moods in which the last portion of the river in Hungary may be far more impressive. Such comparisons are, however, invidious, and those who explore the “schöne, herrliche Wachau” can easily extend their explorings, either afoot or by the new railway, to the Grein district.
The ruins that show boldly on a cliff indicate how well the builders of these old strongholds selected their sites. For Weitenegg was built on a point of the rocky hills where the broad Danube runs along one side, and the Weitenbach runs parallel with it before joining it at the end of the narrow strip on the highest point of which the castle is situated. Thus the old-time owners of the place, in the days when every noble was liable at any time to find himself at enmity with his neighbours, were more or less secure from attack except from the narrow neck joining their narrow hill on to the high one on the west. Now there is little to suggest those days of old-time struggle, and climbing about the ruins we look down on the village, little more than a single row of houses at the foot of the cliff, with wooded “rolling” ground on the further side of the river backed by distant mountains. Behind us are the beautiful hills from which the Weitenbach comes down; hills about which we may find, even in the autumn, many of the flowers of our gardens growing wild—sweet-williams, Michaelmas daisies, and campanulas, while the cyclamen and Virgin Mary’s cowslip plants suggest that earlier in the year this must also be a delightful district for the lover of flowers.