On the tour to Neuschwanstein Castle, I talk about the Knights of Schwangau and how they built several castles in the area. Possibly the earliest of the Schwangau Knights’ constructions was atop a high cliff above a narrow gorge and overlooking the ridgeline where they would soon build the first Hohenschwangau castle.
There, sometime around the 10th century, they built a tower, six meters square and of unknown height. At the top of the tower, they put two piles of wood and jars of oil—what all to make a fire with. It was part of an early-warning system of signal towers that ran throughout the County of Tyrol, which comprised this section of the Alps.
In case of any threat, they would light the fire. One pile was dry wood, the other damp. If at night, the dry-wood fire made a bright light that could be seen for a great distance in the darkness. In daylight, the damp wood made a smoky fire.
Today, there remain several stone courses, showing through moss. Grass grows from cracks between them. This appears to be the tower’s northwest corner. To the right, off the photo, similar though smaller stones mix with turf and tree roots for about six meters along the edge of the cliff.
Before Ludwig II built Neuschwanstein, he had made a topographic plan of the area. Atop the hill next to the bridge, there is marked “Sylphentürm.” Türm, in German, is the word for tower. Sylphen is the plural of sylph. The word sylph, which came into the English language, had only been invented three hundred years before by a German philosopher who intended it to mean an air fairy.1
During Ludwig’s time, there remained still a good portion of the wall, visible from the Hohenschwangau ruins. We imagine that, when the mist rises from the Pöllat River to fill the gorge, the tower on cliff’s edge might appear as though it hangs in the air.
I learned about the existence of the tower and its ruins from an article “Die vergessen Türme” (The Forgotten Towers), which appears in the local weekly paper Kreisbote, December 2017.2 It is part of a series of forty historical articles that ran in the Kreisbote from October 2015 through January 2023. The series’ author is Magnus Peresson, a local architect and historian. In the article, Peresson tells about two other local signal towers from the Tyrolian system: One he calls Siebeler. For the other, he gives no name. Neither has any more stones showing.
You can see these thousand-year-old ruins after the autumn leaves are fallen, through the winter, and into early spring before the trees are in full leaf. Just as you arrive at the top of the hill before Marienbrücke, look to the highest point. [This photo taken April 16, 2025.]
Caution: Should one ignore the signs in German, showing falling stick figures surrounded by red exclamation points, and cross the barbwire, a few steps take you five meters up to the stones. One step beyond takes you 140 meters down to gorge bottom. Lebensgefahr is German for Danger to Life!
Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, commonly known as Paracelsus (1493-1541), was a philosopher of the German Renaissance. He was also a physician and alchemist. In A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits, Paracelsus conceives four types of fairies, one for each of the elements: gnomes (earth), salamanders (fire), undines (water), and sylphs (air). ↩︎
Driving north from Füssen on Highway 16 toward Marktoberdorf, an oddity catches the eye. Beside the road sits a village chapel, terracotta roof and white painted facade angled off the main street. While the walls are plumb with the world, its onion-dome steeple leans away from the street.
At first the mind must work out whether it’s the walls or the steeple not right. A trick is played by the painted clock face and the corner street sign. The first aligns with the walls below, the second with the steeple above.
Chapel of Saints Magnus and Wendelin, Steinbach, Stötten am Auerberg.
I think there must be a story behind that, so I go searching. The village is Steinbach, part of the municipality of Stötten am Auerberg. In a document listing local monuments, the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation labels the building at Hauptstrasse 9 as a “Catholic Chapel of Saints Magnus and Wendelin.” The following text, translated, describes the chapel’s construction:
“Hall building with gable roof, recessed choir with semicircular apse, hipped spire and gable turret protruding over console with octagonal bell story and onion dome, 1726 probably according to plans by Johann Georg Fischer, using parts of a previous building from 1658/60; with furnishings. Refurbished.”
Johann Georg Fischer (b. 1673, Oberdorf; d. 1747, Füssen) was a stonemason and builder. Many works in Füssen and throughout the region are attributed to him.
The chapel’s description makes no mention of the canted steeple. But now I am waylaid by the saints to whom the chapel is dedicated. St. Magnus is widely known in these parts as founder of St. Mang’s Abbey in Füssen and slayer of the Rosshaupten dragon. But who is this Wendelin?
I discovered that Wendelin is a legendary figure. By that, I mean that we know of him only through legends. The first written accounts of the saint’s life were recorded eight hundred years after his death. The earliest known source is the 15th-century Vita Sancti Wendelini, reputedly written by monks of the Benedictine Abbey of Tholey in Saarland, five hours drive northwest of here.
The most often cited source is Reverend Francis X. Weninger’s 1877 Lives of the Saints1. I have compiled this account of Wendelin’s life from that and various other sources. This author confesses the sin of embellishment.
Wendel: wanderer, pilgrim (Old High German). -in: a diminutive suffix.
The story is set in the sixth century. This is after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, before the Holy Roman Empire, during the time of the Franks before Charlemagne.
Wendelin was born into a royal house of Ireland or Scotland, depending on the legend. Scholarship suggests it was more likely Ireland, which the Romans had called Scotia. At the time, various kingdoms struggled against each other for domination of the island.
Statue of St. Wendelin, Basilica of the Fourteen Saints, Bad Staffelstein, Bavaria. Photo Courtesy of Reinhold Möller.
The young prince learned to read and to fight with a sword. Wendelin might have enjoyed all the luxuries afforded the royalty of sixth-century Ireland, but he was a pious youth. He studied scripture and always kept his prayers.
Upon coming of age, he put down the sword and lay aside his crown. He renounced all wealth and heritage and, dressed in simple traveler’s garb, ran away from home to make a pilgrimage to Rome.
He went through France, visiting all the holy sites in that country. In Rome, the young man received the Pope’s blessing and visited the apostles’ tombs. Pilgrimage complete, he traveled north from Rome and came to the Westrich district, in the Diocese of Trier, which today straddles the French-German border. Trier, sometimes called Trèves, is Germany’s oldest city.
Wendelin came to a village, which was named for Baso, the lord of the local manor house. Outside the village, on a low hill beside a small river, he built a crude hut from tree branches. He rested on a bed of leaves. In this simple dwelling, he withdrew into a hermetic life.
Now, the legend goes, Wendelin one day went into the village to beg for his bread. The lord, driving by in a carriage, saw the young man begging bread among the peasants and admonished him. “A strong young lad should work for his bread,” said Baso. “Go and guard my pigs while I go to town.”
Wendelin went to guard the pigs. All the sheep came to him. On Baso’s return, he discovered Wendelin, guarding the pigs amid a flock of sheep.
Over the bleating sheep, Baso shouted to Wendelin, “It seems, lad, you are made to be a shepherd. Lead the flock into the green pastures where the sheep may graze on fresh grass.”
Wendelin took up a crook and led the flock into the pastures and, so, became a shepherd. He led the sheep far across the countryside, where the sheep always grazed in fresh pastures. While the sheep grazed, Wendelin sat in meditation or studying a scripture book, which he always carried.
Each day, he went farther and farther into the hills, and each day he returned with the flock safely to the fold. The sheep were well fed. They fell never to injury nor to sickness. The ewes gave much milk, and the rams were healthy and vital. Lord Baso was pleased with the new shepherd.
One day, while riding horseback far out in the country, Baso came upon Wendelin and the flock of sheep. The lord admonished the shepherd. “You have brought the flock much too far. You will arrive at the fold long after nightfall, and the sheep will be weary.”
Baso was surprised when, in the afternoon, he trotted the horse through the manor gate and found Wendelin perched on a hillock above the fold. The sheep drank at the water trough.
Baso cried out, “It’s a miracle! You have brought the flock far over hill and dale and back to the fold in less time than my horse has carried me the same distance.”
Dismounting the horse, Baso approached Wendelin. He bowed his head before the young man. “You must leave off herding sheep, lad. The Lord our God must have greater plans for you.”
Baso offered him a great sum of money so that he might spend his days in prayer and meditation without begging for food. But Wendelin accepted only his due wages and returned to the hut on the hillside above the river.
Wendelin often took long walks, wandering through fields and woods and far into the hills, where he would meditate and read from the scripture book. When he encountered peasants in their homes or travelers on the road, he witnessed to them. He told them of the blessing of Christ, and so converted many pagans to the faith.
When their cattle were stricken with disease, peasants sought the hermit’s help, and he cured the animals. And when the people were sick, they came to him, and he cured them as well.
Other aspirants came to Wendelin. By his humble aspect and devout practice, Wendelin inspired these novices to lay aside temporal things and seek eternal rewards. There grew up around Wendelin a monastic community.
Then, a pestilence spread throughout the region. The folk of the village beseeched Wendelin to pray that the village be spared. Wendelin kept vigil. For twelve days and nights, he prayed and meditated without rest or sleep. In the twelfth night, he fell, exhausted, into the bed of leaves. Though the pestilence raged throughout the countryside, taking many lives, the village was spared.
In those days, the Bishop of Trier was Magnerich. Magnerich ordered the establishment of an abbey in the nearby town of Tholey. Having heard the story of the hermit who saved the village, he called Wendelin to become the abbot.
Wishing not to give up his hermetic life, Wendelin refused. But Baso came to him and said, “This is the greater plan the Lord our God has for you, lad. As once you were a herder of sheep, now you must be a herder of men.”
So Wendelin went to Tholey and became the abbey’s first abbot. He served as abbot for twenty years before he died. The monks built a tomb in the floor of the abbey church and, during a prayerful ceremony, placed his body within the tomb and covered it with a stone slab.
The next morning, the monks discovered Wendelin’s body atop the stone slab. Taking this as a sign, the monks placed the body in a mule cart and let the mule have its lead. The mule pulled the cart to the site of Wendelin’s old hut on the hillside above the river. There, the monks built another tomb, this one made of stones dragged from the river, and there they reinterred the body.
Peasants came often to the hillside tomb to pray for healing for themselves and for their loved ones and for their animals. Many of these prayers were answered. Word spread, and the faithful began to make pilgrimages to Wendelin’s tomb. After some years, a chapel was built over the tomb. A village grew up around the chapel, and after Wendelin was canonized, the village became known as Sankt Wendel.
Saint Wendelin (b. 554, Scotland; d. 617, Sankt Wendel) is reputedly the first abbot of Tholey Abbey in 597. Patron saint of country folk and herdsmen, Wendelin is venerated today in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The saint’s feast day is celebrated, depending on the regional liturgical calendar, either on October 16, 20, 21, or, as in the Diocese of Trier, on October 22. In art, he is depicted as a young man or a bearded man with a shepherd’s bag and staff. He often carries a book and feeds lambs. Crown and sword lay at his feet.
Two documentary films have been made about Wendelin, both in German and by Barbara Wackernagel-Jacobs for carpe diem Film & TV Produktion:
Wendelin Weltweit: Auf den Spuren eines Heiligen (Wendelin Worldwide: In the Footsteps of a Saint). Directed by Barbara Wackernagel-Jacobs. Saarbrücken, Germany: carpe diem, 2017. Documentary, 72 minutes (11-min trailer).
Magnus of Füssen, missionary and dragon slayer, died in the mid-8th century. When his uncorrupted corpse was discovered a hundred years later, the cleric was canonized and St. Mang’s Abbey founded. The abbey was home to a community of Benedictine monks for a thousand years, until it was dissolved in the German mediatisation at the end of the Holy Roman Empire.
I am happy to announce that, in addition to tours to Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau Castles, I now also guide private tours at the Füssen Town Museum. Contact me for booking details.
Today, the former abbey houses the town’s administrative center, its library, and museum. Exhibits in the Füssen Town Museum reveal the history of the abbey and of the town, beginning with the town’s establishment, in the 1st century, as an important trade center situated on the Lech river and the Roman road Via Claudia Augusta. Displays of lutes, violins, and organs showcase Füssen’s importance as an instrument-making center of Europe throughout the medieval period, and a series of expositions and annotated photographs documents its entry into the industrial age.
On the museum tour, we explore the exhibits and the building itself, which is as much a historical artifact as the antiquities exposed within it. We delve into the excavated ruins of the monastery cloister. We discover its library and refectory; we marvel at the stucco sculptures and frescoes in the lavish Emperor’s Hall, and in the 17th-century St. Anne’s Chapel, we look upon the oldest existing Danse Macabre in Bavaria.
Last year, in an article reproduced from DONJON LANDS, I recount a local legend that tells how to find the dungeons under Neuschwanstein Castle. The legend suggests that the wintertime sun, coming in at a low angle, shines into “a cavernous portal of unknown depth.”
I imagined the scene from the bridge at noon on the hibernal solstice: Sunlight streaming between mountain peaks to penetrate an otherwise hidden passage neath the castle. A glimpse of writhing tentacles or some scaled horror of the underworld.
Come winter, I thought to be able to confirm the legend. Winter in Bavaria, though, is cold and snowy. So, the bridge is closed for much of the season. Furthermore, clouds often shroud the sun, diffusing its light to a blue-gray glow.
On December 21, 2024, the sun rose into a bright cerulean Bavarian sky. Freezing temperatures brought snow and ice in the previous week, closing the bridge for the coming days.
The photo above, taken at 12:20 p.m.—two hours after the solstice—shows the castle in the mountain’s shadow. The photo below was taken from the bridge two months prior, October 25 at 10:16 a.m. Already the castle’s nether regions are obscured.
If the earth tilts back toward the sun at the same rate it titled away, we won’t see any legendary entrance below the castle until well after February. So much for the legend.
Fluke of European history: we had a Bavarian King of Greece for a while.
I am pleased to be presenting this week to the Chania Historians and Archaeologists group at their monthly 1st-Thursday meeting in Crete. It’s a hybrid meeting. From Bavaria, I present online to the group gathered at the local meeting site. The topic is related to my current preoccupation. The first King of Greece was Otto von Wittelsbach, uncle to Ludwig II of Bavaria.
Last castle tour before an autumn vacation, morning commute. Crossing the Lech, I let the bike coast to admire the chalky green-blue river. In the calm, cool air this morning, the surface rippled like stained glass. Reflected light revealed river banks, garbed in autumn leaves, veiled in mist, and leading to Füssen’s first houses coming into town. The peak of Breitenberg pointed above. The high castle showed bright in morning sun, St. Stephen’s monastery in shadow.
Then came the swans. In April, the nesting pair caught my eye. One rested on the nest of gathered grass amid reedy clumps. The other fed along the shore. In May the cygnet hatched. It was gray-brown, a color like Lech mud. On the way between tours, morning and evening, I watched it grow through the summer. First I’d spot the adults, their white shinning in the waterscape. Only then could I discern the grayling, always nearby, mixed into the color of bank brush. By August, white pointed the gray. Today, its neck was bleached to the waterline. Light plumes streaked the folded wings. The family paddled downstream, the adults before and behind the cygnet.
I braked the bike and dismounted, fumbling for the camera in my pack. A couple shots taken, I paused to breathe the river air. Listened to distant chirps, morning birds. Then, beckoned by the day’s tour, I stowed the camera and remounted.
Foot on pedal, a splash drew my attention riverward. The cygnet footed across the surface, neck outstretched, wings flapping. Leaving the water, it slipped into air. A few quick beats of wings, dappled gray and white, brought it into a silent glide above stained glass reflecting a pure white breast. It tilted into a gentle arc. Slid again into water.
It was over in a moment. A moment without thought. A moment of being. A moment passed in simple witness to nature. A moment of grace.
The Lech tumbles through the mountains in a narrow, rocky bed. It pours onto the Bavarian plateau at the town of Füssen and turns north. In times not so long past, where it met level terrain, it spread out into a braided river, flowing around narrow islands, as it meandered toward the Danube.
Neue Burg Hohenschwangau or New Castle at Hohenschwangau (later Neuschwanstein) c. 1881. Photo by Benedikt Siegert.
During the time of Ludwig II, from the bridge behind the old Hohenschwangau ruins—and later the castle construction site—the view of the plateau beyond was not unlike the view today. The braided river Lech ran through the far half along the length of today’s Forggensee.
The Bayerische Wasserkraftwerke (Bavarian waterworks) dammed the Lech river near Roßhaupten /rose-HOWP-ten/ in 1954 to form Germany’s largest reservoir and fifth largest lake. Its purpose: to regulate runoff from spring rain and snowmelt, and so prevent flooding, and to generate electricity. It is the second barrage on the Lech. The first is at Füssen, where the river skirts the town. These are part of a system of more than two dozen barrages that regulate water flow between the Alps and the Danube.
The reservoir is called the Forggensee. See, in German, means lake, and Forggen is the name of a village that now lies beneath the lake’s surface. Several families were moved out of the village before it was drowned. Modern settlements also drowned were Deutenhausen and parts of Weidach (in Füssen), Brunnen (Schwangau), Dietringen, and Dürracker. These are accompanied at lake bottom by ancient sites: the ruins of a Roman villa and a few kilometers of a Roman road, the Via Claudia Augusta.
“Fascination Forggensee” (Faszination Forggensee)
To catch spring rains and melt water, the lake is partially drained in the winter. With the water at its lowest annual levels in March and April, historian Magnus Peresson guides tours into the muddy lake bed. He shows the exposed features, including the Roman ruins and foundations of homesteads, and he tells stories about the people who lived there.
Foundations of Forggen, Sunken Village. The red bits are broken bricks.
I followed Peresson’s tour last April. Not only a historian, Peresson is also an architect. Walking among washed-out ruins, he points to a rectangle where walls once stood. “That was the kitchen,” he says, “see that pipe?” And where a wide wooden timber lay level with the mud, “That was the threshold to the stable.”
Look for “Faszination Forggensee” led by Magnus Peresson at Allgäu Schlosspark.de in late winter and early spring into April.
“Sunken Hamlets” (Versunkene Weiler)
At the moment in Schwangau is an exhibit about the submerged villages, now 70 years gone. Curators Ernst Walz and Christine Velle put together an impressive display of photographs, graphics, newspaper articles, and accompanying text that show the area as it was before and during the dam’s construction.
Village Life Before the Lake.Homes and Farm Buildings in Weidach Before, During, and After the Damming of the Lech.
You can see “Sunken Hamlets” at the Schlossbrauhaus in Schwangau, Saturdays, Sundays, and Wednesdays, 17:00-20:00, until 5 November, and 1 November 14:00-17:00.
Forty degrees and drizzling rain, mid-September, Hohenschwangau—Guiding tours, the worst days are the cold and rainy days. But I’ve had worse best days at other jobs. The most rewarding part of the cold and rainy days is when I’m telling stories to a crowd of tour guests, up to thirty at a time. It’s the hundred-and-somethingth time I’ve told these stories, but I put all the emotion and enthusiasm into them as though I just wrote them this morning. I know them by heart, so I have time to enjoy the telling as much as those listening.
Rain patters on overhead leaves. Gusty wind rattles branches. From green hills beyond, mist rises into blue-gray clouds on a close horizon. An odor of damp, decayed wood wafts in the air. The audience is a diverse crowd of folks of all ages, from different countries, different cultures, from all around the world. They came to a small corner of Europe to see a castle built by a crazy guy who enjoyed going to the opera and building monuments to his idols and to his own imagination. They came to go inside the castle. They didn’t expect to be outside before going in, listening to all these stories about the man who built it and how he came to do so.
Still, here they are, huddled under umbrellas and bundled up in parkas and scarves, arms around each other for warmth—as surprised to be standing there, in the cold and rain, as I am that they stay. They stare holes through me while I talk, some with furrowed brow, some with creased smile. They nod when they recognize some historical fact. They ooh and aah at the intriguing parts. They laugh at the funny bits. After the story about a knight, I point to his statue on the castle’s peak, a silhouette against clouds. They say that was a great story. I tell them I can do better. After the story about a dragon, they say they see the dragon, there in the landscape, shrouded in mist, and they say that was the very best story. Rain runs along umbrella ribs, while time stands still. Time spent in communion with the past and with our fellow humans from way back then and from just now. Time in the cold and rain. Time not they nor I regret not getting back.
I have mentioned before the legend of the Neuschwanstein Dungeons. The dungeons are more easily fabricated in our imaginations than in reality. If they exist, I have identified three ways that we might enter into the unexplored depths beneath a mad king’s castle.
Archway
The legend itself points to the tall dark archway, bottom center at the rear of the structure. If the narrow windows above it are four feet in height, the opening may be about ten feet wide and some 40 feet high.
Off the south side of Marienbrücke (opposite the castle), directly below, the Pöllat River falls down an eroded rock formation. Just to the cascade’s left, a cavern gapes. The spelunker’s entrance would be a winding passage, descending beneath the river and leading, one would think, to the dungeon’s lower levels.
Waterfall Cave Entrance.
Cellar
The two previous points of ingress are difficult to access. The first requires a hazardous climb up from the Pöllat Gorge. The second, a climb down into a flooded cavern. Because the gorge trail is currently closed to the public, braving either might earn an encounter with local authorities.
The third entrance is less perilous. Here, we have still to avoid the authorities, but at the base of the north facade, to the left of a sally port, a simple wooden door looks like it might open into a root cellar. More likely, it’s a service entrance to the sewer. A sewer entrance to the dungeon is an old fantasy trope. It’s a trope for a reason.
Cellar Entrance (left).
Warning
The legend is clear on the point: no one has ever come out of the Neuschwanstein dungeons alive. If they exist, dungeons are dangerous places.
The latest issue of my newsletter went out to subscribers today. In this issue of A Peregrine’s Path, you’ll read about how a Tennessee boy left the island of Crete for the castles of Bavaria.
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