Friday 23rd September

The stellplatz at Nordlingen has proved to be a very quiet place to be at night, except for the church bells every 15 minutes, and the neds practicing donuts in the carpark on the other side of the railway line at 3.30am, and the freight train at 4am, and the 5 minutes of random church bells at 6am and the rubbish lorry at 7am.

I do hope that you’re not getting bored with photos of medieval city walls, towers and churches, looking at our map we are only half way down the Romantic Road. I did restrain myself from taking lots more photos of buildings because despite being very pretty they are similar to those we’ve seen in many other towns.

Again, this stellplatz is located within 100 yards of one of the town gates. Nordlingen has 5 town gates and 11 towers as well as a bastion. The walls and towers were built around 1370 and modified in 1480. Every town down the Romantic Road has a claim to fame and this towns claim is the longest continuous footpath along a defensive wall. We were told it was 1.7km but the town has a diameter of roughly 1km therefore all you maths geeks will know that the path is 3.14km long. It took us about an hour to walk round but then we had to keep taking photos for you 🙂

I must say how surprised I was at the town within the walls. We counted three parks, many of the houses had gardens, there were thousands of fruit trees, apples, pears, figs, walnuts and plums, we saw a brewery, a hospital, 3 churches and a number of huge grain stores. 

Right in the middle of the town is St Georg’s Church built in 1427-1505 which is regarded as the largest and most beautiful of the German Gothic hall churches. Every evening between 10pm and midnight, on the half hour a watchman shouts “So, G’sell, so” (all’s well fellows, all’s well).

More fortified wall loveliness. Down below people are starting to assemble for a wedding, it’s Friday and they will be making their way to the Rathouse.

Deininger tower built in 1516.

A river passes through the town, as well as around the outside, so that water is available to power a watermill and provide for the tanning area of the town.

Sorry, more buildings, the white building to the right is the town hall.

The outside stone steps were unusual and once upon a time I knew why they were built outdoors but that little snippet escapes me for now.

Here I had to climb a really tall tree and even then it was a bit of a stretch to get it all in. Nordlingen has been built within the crater of a meteorite that crashed to earth about 15 million years ago. It wasn’t until I read the blurb that I realised just how much damage was done.

Can you see the hills in the distance, that is the size of the crater. The meteorite was about 1km in diameter, hit the earth with the same explosive power as 250,000 Hiroshima sized atomic bombs, created a crater 25kms in diameter and blasted rock and stone as far as Slovenia. All life within 100km was destroyed. The temperatures caused the rock to melt creating 150 cubic kilometres of a totally unique rock formation called Suevite which has been used to build St Georg’s. Here I’ve climbed St Georg’s Church tower, it’s only 365 steps they said, bloody hard work and I had an old lady chasing me all the way up so I couldn’t stop to catch my breath.

When I said old lady how many of you thought it might be Lucy? Go and stand in the naughty corner. She’s sitting 90m below having a coffee and chatting up the waiter.

Inside the church were more sinuously weaving fan vaulted ceilings very similar to yesterday. What caught my eye were the choir stalls each with a different carved head.

Is this the house that my dad built? The more you look at it the wonkier it gets.

The watermill, this is the new watermill!!

It’s all gone quiet now (except for the bells). We’ve had a marching band practicing over the road and the kids have gone home to watch the Great German Bake Off or Germany’s Got Talent. Fingers crossed it stays quiet.