At the Centre International d'Art Verrier, you can watch glassblowers make real treasures the old-fashioned way in the workshop next to the museum. Moreover, if you are in this region, you cannot miss the glass and crystal blowers. During a guided tour, you can walk through the underground corridors, the weapons depot and the doctor's block, among other things. This defence line was built in the 1930s and is part of the Maginot Line. Besides this castle, the impressive building Le Four à Chaux also deserves a visit. This part of the Vosges is an area full of castles, with Fleckenstein Castle being the best preserved of the four ruins along the French-German border. The rural character gives you a lot of space and plenty of beautiful places that ask to be explored. The Northern Vosges are less well known than the south of Alsace, but truly a paradise for those who travel by campervan, car or motorbike. Weighed down by armour and weapons, an attacker would first have to get across a moat, scale walls, kill armed defenders on the battlements, dodge crossbows from arrow slits, storm the drawbridge, avoid boiling water** and caustic quicklime hurled from above then escape from the narrow, walled passage closed off by the portcullis.Located in the heart of the Northern Vosges Regional Nature Park, the village of Lembach is ideal for starting this road trip. It’s odds on that many turned out to be something of a white elephant. Mind you, it’s doubtful anyone ever got as far as the spiral staircase. Although it bordered land under English occupation, Madame’s Château, which had a moat, massive walls, a drawbridge, two defensive towers, a Keep and a spiral staircase, somehow managed to survive The Hundred Years War. The spiral staircase in Madame’s Studer’s Château Cingé in Bossay sur Claise was built in a clockwise direction. Strangers, especially those wearing armour, would fall and make one hell of a racket alerting anyone above. Known as Trip Steps, defenders of the tower would know each one in the dark. Each was built separately, each was different, resulting in irregularities. They designed the stairs with differing heights. The attacker would have to round the curve and face his adversary before being able to strike.Īnd if you thought the uneven steps in staircases are the result of hundreds of years of tourists clumping up and down you would be wrong. The massive central pillar not only holds the whole shebang together but coming down, keeping tight to the inner wall, a defender could hide and wait in ambush. They could use their swords going up spiral staircases. This is why, in the Middle Ages, or so it’s said, left handed soldiers were much in demand. Even if it was already in hand, the inner wall of the spiral would prevent him from wielding it. Right handers would have found it difficult to draw their sword. Not only could he draw his sword, he could strike downwards and launch effective blows on the enemy below. As most men are right handed, stairs spiralling up clockwise gave those coming down the advantage. Designed to be extremely narrow, space was so tight there was room for only one at a time. It was state of the art, cutting edge, precision engineering. ![]() The story goes that this ingeniously clever concept for defence was dreamed up by stonemasons. These impressive feats of engineering couldn’t be done today, could they? Yes. ![]() For people of a certain age (me) they conjure up images of a sword brandishing, swashbuckling, Errol Flynn in those cheesy films. Nerds (me) love castles, especially those massive stone spiral staircases.
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