A traveller of many years ago said: “Of all the strongholds yet noticed in our passage from Ulm, it takes undisputed precedence; and he who can pass with indifference the many feudal and monastic ruins which overlook the course of the Danube, will pause with uplifted eye and awakened imagination, as the rock-built towers of Dürrenstein flash upon his view. Its massive walls, embattled precipices and iron towers that survive the lapse of centuries, were of themselves amply sufficient to arrest attention and engage the stranger to pass a day within their gates; but when he recollects that yonder donjon tower was the prison of Cœur de Lion, a new chord is touched in his heart—more especially in that of an Englishman—and as he passes under its ponderous gateway and muses in its grass-grown and deserted courts, he feels as if acted upon by some mysterious influence—as if an invisible conductor beckoned him forward—as if the old kingly crusader himself accosted him with ‘Quhat tydings from England?’”
If I cannot claim to have felt the spirit of the place in that fashion, it may be because seventy years have reduced the ruins to a yet more ruinous state, and so the illusion that the king might still be here anxious for “tydings” is little likely to arise. Though the little town itself is attractive, it is of course the ruined fortress that makes the strongest appeal, historically and sentimentally, to the British visitor. Whether approached by way of the scattered rocks on the eastern side, or by the pathway which leads from near within the “ponderous gateway” (to the town, not to the castle) up to the ruins, we find ourselves on the conical summit of rugged rock standing out at the end of a mountain spur among the sadly battered remains of the old castle. Here and there are great pieces of wall still standing, but the whole is in a time-battered, broken state which makes it difficult to recall the plan of the place. One tall piece of wall looks afar off curiously like a gigantic figure, and near at hand but little imagination is necessary to see in it the figure of the great crusader himself!
The view from the castle ruins up the river towards Weissenkirchen across to the mountain-surrounded level on which Rossatz stands and down-stream across a hemmed-in vine-grown battlefield towards Vienna, with the great monastery of Gottweih on a conical hill in the distance, is a most attractive one; while between the ruins and the mountains is a narrow gorge, with beyond it the jagged edge of the extraordinary rock mass where a large part of it was blasted to make the railway which now runs though the hill on which Dürrenstein Castle stands. In the centre of the ruins is a gigantic, more or less roughly cubic, mass of granite out of which a windowless chamber has been roughly hewn, and here, says tradition, is the veritable prison in which Richard was confined by his implacable enemy, Duke Leopold of Austria.
It was when returning from crusading in the east that Richard, travelling disguised through Austria—the Duke of which he had offended at Ascalon—was recognized and so fell into the hands of his enemy and came to be imprisoned in this powerful castle, under the charge of Hadmar, the father of that Hadmar the Hound of Kuenring, of whom we learned at Aggstein. The romantic story runs, that the place of Richard’s imprisonment being unknown, his faithful minstrel Blondel de Nesle set out, wandering all over Europe to learn if he could the fate or whereabouts of the King of England. Accidentally he learned that in Dürrenstein Castle some distinguished person was confined and guarded with unusual vigilance. Not unnaturally he thought that this mysterious prisoner must be the royal master whom he sought. He reached Dürrenstein, but could get no news as to who the prisoner was, and the gates of the castle were shut against him. Blondel then bethought him of a chanson which he and King Richard had composed together, and getting as near within hearing of the prisoner’s place of concealment as he could, he sang his own part of the song:
“Your beauty, lady fair,
None view without delight,
But still as cold as air,
No passion you excite;
Yet this I patient see,
While all are shunned by me.”