Old Tower at Bergen.
The castle of Reiffenberg is the most conspicuous object in the middle distance, if you take stand near Brunhilde’s rock on the top of the Great Feldberg, and look to north-west. Its two tall towers, one round and the other square, crown a knoll at the foot of the mountain. The solitary and starved aspect of the surrounding country gives it a weirdness which does not belong either to Cronberg or Königstein; and the pinched look of the people when we come to the village of Reiffenberg, is enough to tell us that we are in Electoral Hesse. These Hessians, the descendants of the Catti, are a fine race to this day. They are to be seen in greatest perfection in the neighbourhood of Marburg, where the costumes of the women are most remarkable. The Cattian females are not fair, but stalwart, fit to be the mothers of a race of warriors. With a Spartan disregard of the graces, they still brush their hair back from their brown foreheads and pile it up behind with a comb, and bind it with black stuff, as they did when their husbands defied the Romans; and wear their skirts so short as to display to the knee their legs, which look like fluted pillars in their ribbed and embroidered cotton-stockings. Their ambition consists in an endeavour to make themselves as tall as their husbands, who are the highest of the high Germans. Yet the fineness of the race makes more deplorable their poverty-stricken aspect, which is evident at once to one who enters a Hessian village from any of the neighbouring states. Selfish misgovernment is doubtless at the bottom of this. Nor do matters appear to have mended since the time when the Elector of Hesse, to his disgrace and ours, hired out his subjects against their will for war between England and a continental nation. The present Elector also is not very pleasantly known. However, those Germans who happen still to be governed by an obsolete feudalism may be quite sure that they are ten times better off than their fathers who lived in the times of the robber-knights. One tyrant can harm but few now, and public opinion is some restraint upon him; but then in every one of those picturesque castles, lurked a human spider, to whom the surrounding farmers were flies, and even the bees of the industrial towns were occasionally ensnared and their blood sucked, though they wore stings for defence and retaliation. The castle of Reiffenberg is separated from the rest of the crag on which it stands by a great ditch hewn out of the solid rock. Little is left of it but the towers before named, the round one ninety, the square one seventy feet high. Some of the castle fell to pieces about twenty years since. A rock jutting out to the eastward was added to the works of defence by burrowing and cutting out loop-holes, making it a Gibraltar on a small scale.
As there was no opening into the tower below a height unattainable except by a ladder, from which point the winding stair began, the people believed that a subterranean passage gave access to the lower part of the tower, and that great treasures were secreted there, the solid masonry being only a blind to hidden chambers; and there is a story that a man of the village of Reiffenberg once found out this underground way, which is now undiscoverable, and penetrated through it into a bright white chamber, when his lamp was blown out suddenly, and he was hunted out the way he came by screeching spectres. The name is said to have been derived from the Reif, or circle of mountains with which the castle is surrounded. However this may be, the family which gave it its name, or derived its name from it, appears to have existed as early as the fourth century. The
Watch-Tower on the Field of Bergen.
