Weidelsburg

Yesterday, after three weeks and five chapters of intense redrafting, I emerged blinking into the sunlight and resolved to get in the car and go somewhere. Anywhere. I decided to go to Weidelsburg, the biggest medieval castle hereabouts.

I didn't take this photo

From the car park it’s a long, steep climb through a spooky forest. The castle is in ruins, overgrown with grass and brambles, hauntingly isolated up on top of the hill.

I like it when old places are left in this state - tended to a little so it doesn’t fall on your head, but not prettified or tidied up.

This sculpture is about an old legend of the Weidelsburg:

Once upon a time (i.e. 1448) the noble Reinhard von Dalwigk was besieged in the castle by the Landgrave of Hessia. As the situation worsened, Reinhard’s wife beseeched the Landgrave to allow the wives and daughters of the soldiers to leave the castle in safety, taking their most precious possessions with them. The Landgrave agreed, but said that the women could take only what they could carry. So Reinhard’s wife led the other women out of the castle, carrying her husband on her back. In your face, Landgrave of Hessia!

On the way back home I stopped at another hill called Schützeberg, the site of one of Boniface’s first missionary churches. Now it’s just a lot of grass- and cow poo-covered rubble and I had to trespass over a barbed wire fence to get to it, but it was worth it just to stand on the actual spot where Boniface actually baptised actual people.

I’ve just finished reading a couple of Doris Lessing’s books, the most depressing writer of all time with the possible exception of Thomas Hardy. The Grass is Singing, her first book, is about a young couple struggling on their farm in 1940s Rhodesia. Despite having a rather cheery title that could belong to a children’s book about a magical forest grove in the land of talking gumdrops, the novel actually describes a dreary and relentless descent into poverty, madness and death. Her future dystopian drama Memoirs of a Survivor, on the other hand, starts from poverty, madness and death and goes downhill from there. I'm now reading The Fifth Child, which I would not recommend to anyone who is having or ever wants to have a baby (be warned, Plum!).