26^th June.  I woke in a forest just to the south of Koblenz, below one of the many forts that line the Rhine in this steep and picturesque stretch, the Mittelrhein.  I drove for a short while to Saint Goar, where a fellow motorcyclist who admired my “big motor” very kindly gave me a bottle of Riesling, the grapes picked and prepared in the village which we stood.  I then crossed the river by ferry just a little downstream of the Lorelei, or murmuring rock, which rises shear to the height of some hundred and twenty meters.  It is also the narrowest point of the river between Switzerland and the North Sea.  You can see it in Turners accompanying watercolour above.  There is a boat in the foreground navigating the treacherous rapids whose jagged river bed has wrecked many a vessel.

Then came Pfalzgrafenstein, a toll-fort built on an island mid-river.  It served to extract higher taxes from the river traffic, against the wishes of many important people including the pope who threatened the baron who built it with excommunication in the early 14^th century.  It too was rendered by Turner but his impression is quite impossible to match with the single and fixed point of a camera.

I had first been attracted to the location by Britain’s most celebrated painter, through an exhibition catalogue, ‘Turner in Germany’, by Cecilia Powell.  A leading authority on Turner, I was fortunate enough to meet her in Tate Britain some years ago where she introduced me to a collection of Turner’s Venetian scenes.  A fantastic series of works on paper with hallucinatory colouring and wobbling reflections quite unlike anything I had seen before.  Although her knowledge and passion where unmistakable, at the time I was blissfully unaware of who she was.

It was exciting to drive through the country I had seen in the parallel world of paint, navigating the narrow roads squashed between the gorge side and the Rhine which Turner had walked and drawn.  As I ate my supper in Koblenz, looking onto Ehrenbreitstein, caught in the last of the evening light, I could not help but think of the old master.  He produced a great number of studies of the castle not only for its majesty, but also because he was on assignment; illustrating Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.  And so I will leave you a fitting verse:

Here Ehrenbreitstein, with her shattered wall
Black with the miner’s blast, upon her height
Yet shows of what she was, when shell and ball
Rebounding idly on her strength did light;
A tower of victory! from whence the flight
Of baffled foes was watch’d along the plain:
But Peace destroy’d what War could never blight,
And laid those proud roofs bare to Summer’s rain–
On which the iron shower for years had pour’d in vain.
(Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III, v.58)

Please be aware Ehrenbreitstein was partially dismantled and dynamited by the French during the Napoleonic wars as they withdrew in truce not as they attacked.

You can find Cecilia Powell’s ‘Turner in Germany’ on Amazon amongst other online bookshops and if your local book shop doesn’t stock it they should certainly be able to oder it in.

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