Rüdesheim

Ferries push across the water in front of you to Bingen, on the far bank, in about six minutes. Between Mainz and Koblenz there is no bridge over the Rhine, so on 84 kilometres of river the only way across is by boat. To your right, upstream, the Rhine has flowed west for about 25 kilometres since Wiesbaden. Just downstream, at the Binger Loch, it turns north into the gorge. Rüdesheim sits at that bend, and the stretch from here to Koblenz, 65 kilometres, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since June 2002, the Upper Middle Rhine Valley. For centuries this bank was where the land road stopped. There was no road along the river to Assmannshausen and Lorch, so everyone travelling downstream had to change onto a ship here. Rüdesheim men earned their living as freight and ferry boatmen, as pilots and as steersmen on the timber rafts. Travellers waited in town for a suitable ship, and that is how so many inns grew up along this front. The ships still come. From April to the end of October passenger boats run between Mainz and Cologne, and the river cruises between Basel and Rotterdam stop here too. Along more than a kilometre of riverbank there are about twenty landing stages for the different shipping lines. The railway came in 1856. The station behind you opened on 11 August that year, on the line along the right bank of the Rhine; the classicist building is by the architect Heinrich Velde. Walk up from the riverside path to Rheinstraße. The heavy square block of stone just ahead, with the vineyard in front of it, is the Brömserburg.

The walls of this castle are four to five metres thick, and the small round-arched windows show it. The Brömserburg, also called the Niederburg, is probably one of the first stone castles in the Upper Middle Rhine Valley. A wooden alder pile from the foundation of its south-east tower, the oldest part, was dated to between 1044 and 1216. A second building phase followed around 1186 to 1190, which gave the castle the four vaulted wings you see as a single block today. Historic prints show the Rhine running right along the south front, where the road and the riverbank are now. The castle carries the name of the Brömser family, a branch of the local knights of Rüdesheim. Despite the name, the Brömser never lived here. They lived in their own house on Oberstraße, the Brömserhof, which is our fourth stop. In 1640, during the Thirty Years' War, French troops blew up the corner facing the Rhine and the top of the keep. After the family died out in 1668, the castle stood empty and decayed. People called the ruin "Brömser's dog kennel", later "Metternich's dog kennel", after the next holders of the fief. From 1811 the counts of Ingelheim rebuilt it as a romantic country seat. The castle was lived in until 1937, and the town of Rüdesheim has owned it since 1941. The blown-up corner was rebuilt in 1961, and in 1969 the keep was raised again to 27 metres. From around 1950 until 2017 the castle housed the Rheingau Wine Museum. It is closed while a citizens' consortium restores the building; until it reopens, events take place in the castle garden. Walk north a few steps into Niederstraße. The tall, plain tower that rises behind the castle is the Boosenburg.

The tower above you is 38 metres tall, and it is all that is left of a whole castle. The Boosenburg, also called the Oberburg, the upper castle, stood a little above the Brömserburg. It was probably built in the 12th century by one of the knightly families of Rüdesheim, as a tall keep inside a ring wall with a moat nine metres wide. More living quarters were added in the late Middle Ages. From 1474 the castle belonged to the Boos von Waldeck, and their name stuck to it. In 1830 it passed to the counts of Schönborn-Wiesentheid, who had every building pulled down in the 1830s except the tower. They made the tower taller and gave it neo-Gothic battlements, the crenellated top you see today. The next owner turned the castle into a wine business. After 1860 the wine merchant Baptist Sturm had the old moat vaulted over to make a wine cellar. In 1872 his widow had a neo-Gothic villa built next to the tower, designed by the architect Franz Schädel. The castle is still private property of a winery, and the tower cannot be entered. Rüdesheim once had four castles inside its small old town: the Niederburg, this Oberburg, the Vorderburg near the market square, of which only the stump of a square tower survives, and a fourth of which nothing is left. That is a lot of towers for a town whose old core measures about 300 by 200 metres. Walk up to Oberstraße and turn right. The house with the red-and-white half-timbered corner tower is the Brömserhof.

The red-and-white corner tower, with three pointed slate caps, belongs to the Brömserhof, the house where the Brömser knights really lived. Their core building on the north-west side was a fortified house from around 1310. When Rüdesheim built its new town wall around 1500, the Brömserhof was worked into it as a corner bastion, which explains the thick walls still inside the main house. Each generation added something. In the mid-16th century Heinrich Brömser and his wife Walpurga von Greiffenclau renewed the house and had two upper rooms covered with wall and ceiling paintings. About twenty stonemasons worked on the rebuilding; you can tell from the different masons' marks on the stairs and door frames. Their great-grandson Heinrich, the third of that name, added the oriel over the entrance. His and his wife's coats of arms and the year 1650 are carved on it. In 1646 he was made a baron for his part in the peace negotiations that ended the Thirty Years' War. He died childless on 25 November 1668, and the family line ended with him. The town bought the main house in the 1850s and used it as a poorhouse, a shelter, a kindergarten and a school. Later it stood empty for a long time. Since 1975 the Brömserhof has housed Siegfrieds Mechanisches Musikkabinett, a museum of self-playing musical instruments. Siegfried Wendel opened it in October 1969 in Hochheim am Main, moved to Rüdesheim in 1973, and leased this house in 1975; he bought it from the town in 1998. The collection has about 350 instruments from three centuries, from music boxes to fairground organs and orchestrions, and it is shown on guided tours. Walk on east along Oberstraße. After about a hundred metres you reach the station of the cable car.

Two-person gondolas leave from here and float over the vines up to the Niederwald, 1,400 metres away and 209 metres higher. The ride ends near the Niederwald monument, the 38-metre statue group of Germania built between 1877 and 1883 above the town to mark the founding of the German Empire in 1871. The first visitors went up on donkeys. From 30 May 1884 a rack railway, the Niederwaldbahn, climbed 2.3 kilometres through the vineyards. It was not rebuilt after the Second World War and was dismantled in 1952. In the summer of 1953 local businesspeople, the town and the Rheingau district founded a company to build a cable car, and it opened at Easter 1954. It cost 350,000 Deutschmarks. The first gondolas hung only seven metres above the vines, and the line had to stop now and then to let the winegrowers' machines through. In the 1960 film "G.I. Blues", Elvis Presley sings "Pocketful of Rainbows" with Juliet Prowse in gondola number 76. Presley never rode it; the scene was a photo montage. Fans still ask for number 76. In its fiftieth year, 2004, the cable car carried its 30-millionth passenger. A new line opened in 2005, with up to 85 larger gondolas in a retro style, now running 15 metres above the vines. It can carry 720 people an hour in each direction, and since May 2022 the valley station has been step-free. The cable car runs from late March to the start of November and again during the Christmas market; check the current times before you go. If you take it, you can come back down to this spot and pick up the walk here. Walk a few steps west along Oberstraße to the top of the Drosselgasse, and go down the lane towards the Rhine.

This lane is two metres wide and about 144 metres long, cobbled from Oberstraße down to the Rhine. It is one of six narrow lanes that link the upper street with the riverbank, and the busiest; the number usually given is about three million visitors a year. The Drosselgasse is first mentioned in the 15th century as a quarter of Rhine boatmen. Their boats stayed tied up at the bank, and they carried only sails, oars, ropes and tools home, so their houses and back yards were reached by narrow hallways off the lane. Later, winegrowers' taverns moved in, and in the 18th and 19th centuries better-off citizens and officials followed. The duchy of Nassau's local administration and tax office and, later, the Prussian district office were based here. In the second half of the 19th century the taverns became a day-trip destination. The Drosselhof, the half-timbered house in front of you with the year 1727 on its gable, competed for guests with live music and had its own drinking songs written. According to the town archive, 1727 probably marks a rebuilding, and a proper wine tavern opened in the house in 1857. Its landlord Johannes Müller gave students from the technical college in Bingen free food on Sundays if they came and sang to draw in customers. In 1887 Otto Hausmann wrote the song "Zu Rüdesheim in der Drosselgass'", which was later played on early German radio between programmes. A fire destroyed the lower end of the lane in 1883. More wine taverns opened from 1928, among them the Lindenwirt. Much of the lane was rebuilt in the 1950s, and today wine taverns, beer bars and souvenir shops share it. Continue down to Rheinstraße and turn left, then follow the lanes east past the Klunkhardshof, a half-timbered house begun around 1453, to the market square and the church.

The tower with the dark onion-shaped cap rises over the market square, the centre of the old town. The square was already the heart of Rüdesheim in the Middle Ages: a nobleman called "Konrad de foro", Konrad of the market, is recorded in 1210, and the archbishop of Mainz had a manor house here, at today's Marktplatz 14, by 1128. The town itself first appears in writing in 1074, when Archbishop Siegfried I gave a newly planted vineyard "in Rothenesheim" to a new collegiate foundation at Hasungen. The church is St. Jakobus, dedicated to Saint James. Its oldest part is hidden in the lower floors of the north tower, an early Romanesque chapel from the 11th century. Around 1400 Johann Brömser paid for a long hall church, which was vaulted in 1489 when the north aisle was added. In 1912 the church was extended to the east and south. Between 1946 and 1956 it was rebuilt in a changed form, and the present cap was placed on the tower in 1959. The west front with its small eight-sided corner turrets and the north aisle with the tower survive from the older church. Inside, the Brömser family is everywhere. A sandstone altar of 1600, showing the Holy Family returning from Jerusalem, was given by Hans Richard Brömser and Anna Margareta von Kronberg to remember their wedding in 1587. A late Renaissance tomb of 1597 shows Heinrich Engelhard Brömser lying down. Listen for the bells. Since 1 December 2018 the tower has rung nine of them together. The smallest dates from the 13th century and is the only one that survived both world wars. Since 2015 St. Jakobus has been a branch church of the new parish of Heilig Kreuz Rheingau, whose main church is in Geisenheim. Leave the square to the south-east and walk down towards the river. The white round tower on the corner by the water is the Adlerturm.

This round white tower once stood with its feet in the Rhine. The Adlerturm, the Eagle Tower, is the south-east corner tower of the old town wall, built in the second half of the 15th century and about 20 metres high. It is the only one of the wall's towers still standing. Its old name was the Pulverturm, the Powder Tower, because the town kept its gunpowder in the vaulted rooms. Before about 1820 it had a steep slate roof above the battlements. The town archive notes that its shape recalls the Friedberger Warte in Frankfurt, possibly by the same builder. The tower got its present name in the 19th century, when the owner of the neighbouring Gasthaus Zum Adler bought it. A well-known story says Goethe stayed in that inn. He did come to Rüdesheim: on 15 August 1814 his carriage rolled in from Wiesbaden in four and a half hours. The town archive checked the house register and found that the Haus zum Adler was then two private houses, not an inn. Goethe and his companions most likely stayed at the Goldene Krone, across the street. East of the tower, by the water, there is a bulwark of heavy sandstone blocks called the "Schanz". It was never part of the defences. It was built to push breaking ice away from the bank in winter. Next to you is the KD landing stage, where the Rhine boats tie up, and the riverbank promenade runs west back to where we started. That is the end of the walk. The station is about 900 metres west along the river, about 12 minutes on foot. If you have time, go back to the cable car on Oberstraße and ride up to the Niederwald for the view over the Rhine bend.