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War trains
Many railways across Europe were built to satisfy military ambition. In the hinterland of Berlin there is a railway line which was constructed quite explicitly as a military plaything. In the Nazi period, the very existence of this railway ...
A London oasis: the Walthamstow Wetlands
To have the opportunity to observe a landscape through the seasons, whether an urban swath of green and blue or something more obviously exotic, is a rare and wonderful thing. Over the past year and more Rudolf Abraham has watched the Walthamstow ...
On the wrong side of the line: report from a Ukrainian village
Sofia Bezverhaya says she is always glad to cater to those who want to see a more traditional picture of the region. “I am grateful that people are coming,” she says, “and especially when they bring bread, oil, and supplies! We have a mobile shop, ...
In search of Tesla: the road to Smiljan
Nikola Tesla’s father was an Orthodox priest. Nikola was baptised in his father’s church on the day after his birth. And it is at that church, dedicated to the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, where crowds now gather to understand more of the life and ...
Flashback 1971: travels of yesteryear
There was a time when you could travel from Turin or Trieste to Moscow or from Istanbul to Beirut or Baghdad without changing trains. We look back half a century and explore the rail journeys which were on offer in the summer of 1971. It was a time ...
Slavutych and the nuclear industry
The Ukrainian city of Slavutych is a striking surviving example of a planned Soviet city underpinned by utopian principles – and even if the latter were sometimes diluted by pragmatism, there is a palpable sense of a well-designed and carefully ...
The Slaney Valley
There can be few finer spots to be, on these bright spring days, than exploring the land around the River Slaney in south-east Ireland. The lower reaches of the Slaney, from Enniscorthy down to Wexford, is a gorgeous sweep of river. But we reserve ...
Vintage pleasures: a taste of Alsace
If Alsace has a regional watchword, it is balance. It is as true of Alsace’s complex history, deftly melding French and German interests, as of the region’s remarkable wines. Join us as we explore the Alsace wine route, taking in some of ...
Queen of the mountains: celebrating 150 years of the Rigi rack railway
The slopes of the Rigi climb up above Lake Lucerne, though the mountain itself claims no great height. Its summit is at less than 2,000 metres. But the railway to the top of the Rigi claims special status as Switzerland's first mountain railway. ...
A tale of two bridges: the work of William Tierney Clark
It's no coincidence that the graceful bridge that spans the River Thames in Marlow looks remarkably similar to Budapest's celebrated Széchenyi Lánchíd (Chain Bridge) over the Danube – though the latter is much larger than its English counterpart. ...
Alsace grape types
Do you know your Sylvaner from your Muscat? Your Pinot Gris from your Pinot Blanc? Here’s a quick and easy guide to the nine main varieties of grapes used in the production of various Alsace wines. We would wager that there may be one or two ...
Where Europe meets Asia
Pull off the main highway just west of Ekaterinburg and you'll find a fairly new monument that purports to mark the border between Asia and Europe. The design recalls the Eiffel Tower in Paris, a nice reminder that Ekaterinburg iron was used to ...
Budapest transport
The steep topography around the Hungarian capital, especially on the west bank of the Danube, meant that great ingenuity was needed in developing public transport. Examples are the famous funicular up to Buda Castle and a cog railway, both dating ...
Alsace wines: a personal selection
To accompany our Alsace feature in hidden europe 63 (published on 15 March 2021), here’s a selection of Alsace wines which we rate as being very drinkable and reasonable value for money. We have listed them here by grape type - for most wines from ...
A village on the polder
There’s a village on the polder which we really like. It’s called Jisp. It is one of those long straggly places where you see cloudscapes just like those in the paintings of Jacob van Ruisdael - the Dutch artist who was born in Haarlem, which is ...
Wuppertal's famous son
The German city of Wuppertal marks the bicentenary of the birth of Friedrich Engels this autumn. He was born in the Barmen district of Wuppertal on 28 November ...
Who was Friedrich Oswald?
Friedrich Engels is not someone we would normally associate with travel writing. But, as a young man, he wrote a number of articles in the travel genre; they were all published under the nom de plume Friedrich ...
The Land of Red Gold: Luxembourg's Southern Fringe
Luxembourg has long been among the most multicultural of European nations. In the southernmost part of the country, the iron ore industry attracted workers from Italy and later Portugal. We explore a region of the Grand Duchy which is a world apart ...
Shades of Blue: Indigo Dyeing in Austria
The process of indigo dyeing of cloth - called Blaudruck in German - now features on UNESCO's list of valued cultural heritage. Guest contributor Rudolf Abraham travels to Austria to meet the craftsmen and women who keep alive this old ...
Luxembourg - From Iron Foundries to Diplomacy
Deep in a valley just a short hike north from Luxembourg's ville haute, in villages which once echoed to the clamour of forges and foundries, the might of industry has been replaced by the soft power of ...
The Spirit of the Vosges
Join us as we discover the Vosges hills in the Alsace and Lorraine regions of eastern France. It's a region which has always been a wellspring of fine ideas, cutting a dash in the world of culture and industry. We visit a valley once settled by the ...
Unfinished business
In a field near the village of Urbès in eastern France, a stretch of graceful railway viaduct stands alone in a valley. It has never been connected to any railway line. It's a poignant reminder of what might have ...
The Art of Drystone Walling
With the art of drystone walling recognised by UNESCO as part of Europe's cultural heritage, communities across the continent are now seeing these traditional walled boundaries in a new light. Rudolf Abraham has gone in search of drystone wall ...
The German Manchester
This week we travelled slowly through Lusatia, exploring communities once sustained by extensive vineyards and a thriving textile industry. The modestly sized town of Forst on the west bank of the River Neisse once styled itself as the German ...
Border Making - Border Breaking: Writing Transport History on the Belarus Frontier
When the Augustów Canal was built, its route lay entirely in the Russian Empire – just like the route of the railway from St Petersburg to Warsaw which opened a couple of decades later. But empires fade, and that canal and railway now cross ...
Summit-level-Canals
Canals which breach great drainage divides are always interesting. There's one, opened in 1992, which links the River Danube with the River Main, the latter a tributary of the Rhine. So today it's possible to travel on a ship through the very heart ...
Farewell to a London Ghost Train
This is the story of Paddington’s ghost train which runs for the last time today. The 11.35 to High Wycombe uses the New North Line out of Paddington towards the Chiltern ...
Another Switzerland: The Road to Jyrgalan
Rustic and homely, albeit perhaps a little frayed at the edges, the village of Jyrgalan brings to mind a parallel universe Switzerland where life has just gone a little feral. Enjoy this report from Kyrgyzstan by hidden europe author ...
Lakeside Tradition: Exploring the Lavaux Vineyards
The Lavaux area in Switzerland is one of Europe's oldest winegrowing regions, a distinction which has earned for Lavaux a place on UNESCO's World Heritage List. The Lavaux vineyards drape the north shore of Lake Geneva at the western end of the ...
Tracking through Berlin
This year marks the 180th anniversary of the opening of the first railway in Prussia. This was the line from Berlin to Potsdam. So we joined fellow Berliners on a 1950s-vintage railcar that went from Lichterfelde West to Gesundbrunnen ...
By the shores of Loch Fyne
In Victorian Scotland, the public took great interest in technology, and so the detonations at the quarry of Crarae on the west shore of Loch Fyne became something of an attraction. The regular steamer from the Clyde to Inveraray would pause at ...
Lanzarote's White Gold: The Dying Art of Salt Harvesting
Guest writer Diego Vivanco takes us on a tour of the salt works at Janubio on Lanzarote, where Modesto Perdomo worked for over forty years. Now this industrial landscape is finding new life as a conservation zone where visitors can discover the ...
Going Against the Flow: Taking the Unofficial Way to IJmuiden
We explore a secret road which crosses locks and sluices to give access to an industrial landscape on the coast of Holland. It's a rare opportunity to see how work is progressing on Europe's largest ...
Railways and World Heritage
Railways have long been a component of successful World Heritage applications. In 1986, Britain made its very first successful application to UNESCO and Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire was inscribed on UNESCO's List. Yet it was not before 1998 that ...
Forbidden places
Next weekend, there's the chance to visit an extraordinary place in England - a village where the entire population was forcibly removed in 1943 in order to provide space on Salisbury Plain for American military manoeuvres. It's one of those places ...
Everything but the Lorelei
The various hill areas of central Germany, stretching from Bohemia to the River Rhine and beyond, have helped define the landscapes of the region. And last week I took time out to explore some parts of this hill country, wandering from the ...
Eric and the Windmill: Keeping Dutch Land Dry
A windmill is a retreat from modernity and a place to ponder the passing of the seasons in the Dutch landscape. No-one knows that better than Eric Zwijnenberg who, for over half a century, has managed a traditional smock mill in the province of ...
Smock Mills
The smock mill is a distinctive element of the Dutch cultural landscape. The functionality and simplicity of these simple mills has made them popular exports, and migrants from the Netherlands built smock mills in New England, South Africa and ...
Exploring the dyke
We crossed the Afsluitdijk last week on a long journey from Berlin to the island of Barra in Scotland's Outer Hebrides. Most other vehicles on the Afsluitdijk road sped along close to the speed limit. Instead of dashing over the dyke, we stopped ...
Follow the Red Brick Road: Baltic Gothic Architecture
From Lübeck and Stralsund to Malbork and Tartu, the distinctive decorative red-brick architecture is regarded as an iconic feature of the Baltic region. We take a look at the architectural tradition often known by its German name ...
Prizren's World of Silver: Crafting Filigree in Kosovo
Guest contributor Emma Levine, a first-time contributor to hidden europe magazine, invites us to join her in Prizren, Kosovo, where she discovers that the delicate art of filigree crafting still ...
Cramond: an Ancient Village in Edinburgh
Duncan Smith's 'Only in' series of city guides always strikes a chord with hidden europe readers. Here, Duncan gives a taste of his new Edinburgh guide, introducing us to the Cramond district of the Scottish ...
Beware of Assassins: Life and Death in the Railway Carriage
The fear of being murdered on a train was once so great that affluent country squires donned old clothes to travel with the crowds in third class. It was, they judged, safer than travelling in splendid isolation in first class. We take a look at ...
The Maastricht factor
Do you not find that some towns have instant appeal? That's how we feel about Maastricht, a medium-size city tucked away in the southernmost part of the Netherlands - a region called Limburg. It's forty years since the last of the Limburg coal ...
Sidelined by History: The Czech-German Borderlands
The border between the state of Saxony in eastern Germany and neighbouring Bohemia is defined by a range of mountains which have provided a rich bounty of minerals - from copper and silver to uranium. Join us as we explore the Ore ...
The Swiss Factor: From Chexbres to the Black Sea
Wines from the Shabo region of southern Ukraine often combine typical Black Sea region grapes (such as Saperavi) with grape types well known in western Europe. No surprise, perhaps, as it was Swiss vintners who helped found the wine industry in ...
News from Haidemühl
The Czech energy group EPH has taken over the lignite mining operations in eastern Germany previously managed by Swedish company Vattenfall. What does this mean for the village of Haidemühl, now abandoned for almost a decade, which sits in a area ...
Bosna-gauge Railways
Had the Balkan region narrow-gauge rail network survived, it would surely today be a cherished asset in promoting tourism over a wide region - in much the same way as the narrow-gauge Rhaetian Railway network has been important in attracting ...
And to the Bells, a Voice
The Portuguese tradition of making cowbells is an endangered rural craft. Rudolf Abraham travels to the Alentejo region of Portugal to visit a workshop where cowbells are still crafted in the traditional ...
A Visit to the Old Country
Beside the River Elbe, just downstream from Hamburg, lies the Altes Land. It is one of Europe's most intensive areas of fruit cultivation. Apples, raspberries, cherries and plums aplenty in a region which owes much to early Dutch ...
The Best of Both Worlds
On a lake to the east of Berlin is Europe's sole surviving example of a ferry which relies on an overhead cable to pick up electricity. The Straussee ferry is an unusual transport ...
Silent witness
Discover the extraordinary story of how an Italian village was sacrificed to provide hydro-electric power for Switzerland. The evacuation of Curon Venosta (or Graun-im-Vinschgau in German) was a tragedy. Today the church campanile rises serenely ...
No train to Poland
The decision 170 years ago to build a great viaduct across the Neisse Valley was a visionary leap. Now that elegant structure needs a dose of 21st-century vision. Because what use is a graceful viaduct if it doesn't have any ...
Longyearbyen Airport, 40 years on
Today marks the fortieth anniversary of the official opening of the airport at Longyearbyen on 2 September 1975. It was an event which dramatically changed this polar outpost, making it far more accessible to the scientific community and ...
Secret spits and shingle: along the Suffolk shore
The coast of Suffolk, where England meets the North Sea, has inspired many writers. WG Sebald saw the forlorn landscapes of the Suffolk shore as a place to "sense the immense power of emptiness." In this article, Laurence Mitchell - a regular ...
Loch Lubnaig
We love real weather. And we had real weather aplenty on a journey through Scotland this week. Clear blue skies at Carsaig Bay with glorious views west to Jura. Great spreads of grey-white snow over Rannoch, the hills all hidden in mist. A lone ...
The Talgo tale
The story of the Talgo trains of Bosnia reveals a quite stunning waste of money. This is a country which invested in a new fleet of trains which are simply incompatible with its antiquated rail ...
Setting Forth
One firth: three bridges. Each of the three bridges over the Firth of Forth was built in a different century. There is the 19th-century rail bridge, a 20th-century road bridge and now the new Queensferry Crossing road bridge under construction. ...
Following Faust up the Brocken
In our second article to mark 25 years since the political changes in East Germany of late 1989, we make a pilgrimage to one of Germany's most celebrated mountains: the ...
Wealden diary
The equinox has passed and now a hint of frost dances by dawn on the more sheltered meadows. Restless stonechats are busy on the high heaths, where we stand and gaze on distant Wealden ridges fading into misty morning sunshine. This is one of ...
Glowing in the dark
The main road drops down from the hump of the mountain in a series of sharp zigzags. Polished blue sky above, velvety green forests all around and the tacho ticking off the miles of grey tarmac below. We are on the south side on the ore-rich hills ...
Tales from Titovka
Everyone stops at Titovka sooner or later. That's the way things are up here in the far north-west corner of Russia. The Titovka roadside café is on the highway that runs west from Murmansk towards the mining towns of Zapolyarny and ...
Escape from Carlsbad
The funicular railway to the Café Diana on the hills above the spa town of Karlovy Vary marks a birthday this summer: it was opened to the public in 1914. It remains the easy way to get a bird's-eye view of Karlovy Vary (the town often referred in ...
Double act: the Danish island of Ærø
The Danish island of Ærø is no more than a fleck in the Baltic. Yet this beautiful island is a good place to understand Danish history. If you are ever in any doubt as to how much the sea has inflected the Danish experience, make time for Marstal, ...
Into the hills: a Bohemian diversion
Of course one can speed across Europe on sleek, fast trains. But slow trains, the kind that dawdle along branch lines, are so much more interesting. We ride a rural rail route in northern Bohemia, where fading railway stations reveal a Habsburg ...
Tales from the A39
Forget the Maserati centenary celebrations this year. 2014 marks the centenary of the Mendip Motor. Chewton Mendip was never destined to become a Detroit. But one hundred years ago this month this small Somerset village saw the launch of the Mendip ...
The lost kingdom
A 1924 essay by Joseph Roth on an unsung railway station in Berlin fired our imagination and inspired us to take the train to Gleisdreieck - an elevated station that in Roth's day looked down on a tangled maze of railway lines and sidings. ...
Traces in the landscape: a Swedish nature reserve
Paul Scraton, a first-time writer for hidden europe, invites us on a journey to the Kindla Nature Reserve in central Sweden. It is a chance to see how a landscape rejuvenates after centuries of mining ...
100 years of buses
If British buses had a golden age, it was in the years just prior to the First World War. Motorised buses were changing British streetscapes. New routes were being launched every week, and suddenly a ride on a bus was an option even for those of ...
The route to Zakopane: a journey of the spirit
The slow train journey from Kraków to Zakopane seems to last an eternity. The names of the forty-one stations along the way – and our train pauses at every one of them – make a wonderful litany of Polish toponyms. The route takes in a remarkable ...
The ghost of Beeching
Is cutting public transport links in rural areas and across its borders really the right way for Croatia to gear up to join the European Union this summer? We look at how the pieties of the market are playing havoc with rail services in the north ...
Leaving the Tatras
I discovered yesterday that the traveller wanting to take a train out of Zakopane is hardly spoilt for choice. Early birds can opt for the 03.27 to Kraków. Then the next departure from the resort in the Tatra mountains of southern Poland is not ...
Between the flux: Live on the shores of Lake Sevan
The story of Lake Sevan reveals the tensions between economic development and environmental security in modern Armenia. Jamie Maddison travels around the shores of Lake Sevan to discover how the politics of water management play havoc with the ...
Remembering Rachel
Wander through the industrial landscapes around Ajka and you'll see a Hungary that does not feature in the tourist brochures. Lake Balaton is just over the hills to the south. The lake stands for recreation and fun. Ajka stands for something quite ...
Mining heritage
A new crop of European heritage has just been added to UNESCO's celebrated list of notable heritage. The newcomers to the World Heritage List include remarkable industrial villages in Flanders and Wallonie, a German opera house and a clutch of ...
England’s favourite: the port of Boulogne
The port city of Boulogne has always attracted visitors from across the Channel. Tobias Smolett came and so did Charles Dickens who called the town his "favourite French watering hole", declaring it to be "every bit as good as Naples". Today, the ...
Tussling with the elements: Jutland
Survival on Jutland's coast has always been a question of working with nature. Great storms have transformed the sandy coastline and entire communities have come and gone with the ebb and flow of history. We travel north along the Danish mainland's ...
Agar Town
We remember Agar Town, an area of London that simply disappeared from the maps when in 1866 the Midland Railway edged south towards St ...
La Maison de la Beurière
Today, the steeply sloping streets behind Boulogne's Quai Gambetta no longer have the character of a closely-knit fishing community. hidden europe visits a little museum that recalls the former life of this distinctive part of the French port ...
Women on the rails
International Women's Day (IWD), which is celebrated today in many countries across the world, has been a feature of the European social landscape for more than a century. From the outset, IWD gave focus to a range of initiatives across Europe that ...
West to Reading
The fast trains from London to Reading take a mere twenty-four minutes for the journey. And First Great Western (FGW), successor to Brunel's celebrated Great Western Railway, happily still name some of their trains. Scanning the current FGW ...
Letter from St Pancras
There is something quite exquisite about grand railway termini. Folk fly through them, the dash for the train diminishing the status of these great cathedrals to travel. But these are not places through which one should rush. So we lingered at St ...
Polish mysteries
We drifted slowly through wintry forests, past unkempt meadows and villages full of scrawny desolation. We crossed the River Odra four times. And four times I gazed down at the river's wine-dark waters from the train, watching the waters swirling ...
Steaming through the Harz Mountains
The Harz Mountains lie astride the erstwhile border between East Germany and West Germany. The forested hills of the Harz preside over the North European Plain. The eastern portion of the Harz benefits from a legacy of East Germany: a wonderful ...
Shaping socialist history: Tampere
Lenin's promise that Finland would be granted her independence after the Bolshevik Revolution was first made in Tampere. This Finnish city has a fine industrial and political heritage, as we discover when we visit a museum devoted to the life and ...
The 313 to Botany Bay
We were having difficulty being enthusiastic about Enfield. Jack, an amiable octogenarian who is Enfield born and bred, is more positive. "Heavens," he exclaims. "You've no idea. Enfield has been important for centuries. Do you remember the Lee ...
Szczecin (Poland)
For a spell Swedish, then German (and known as Stettin) and only since 1945 Polish, Szczecin is distant from the hubs of Polish power. Its shipyard workers played a key role in the Solidarity movement of the nineteen-eighties. But the city feels ...
In search of a new role: the port city of Szczecin
The shipyards in Szczecin once built some the world's finest and fastest passenger liners. But today the cranes are silent, and the city of Szczecin is struggling to define its role in modern Poland. The Baltic port city is a gritty place, and all ...
Cologne’s subterranean chandelier
Urban explorer Duncan Smith escorts us on a journey below the streets of Cologne to see the city’s well-appointed ...
Birmingham silences
Head out along the Bristol Road and you get an eyeful of Birmingham's suburbs. Leaky ipods and restive mobiles mix with discarded newspapers and chip wrappers on the upper deck of Bus 61 that runs all the way out to Frankley. An empty Red Bull can ...
Romania: Polish communities of the Suceava region
Romania is one of several countries in Europe that give guaranteed access to parliamentary seats to national minorities. One of the ethnic minorities in Romania that benefits from this scheme is the Polish community. We take a look some Polish ...
Winter in eastern Germany
The temperature was still around minus fifteen when we alighted just after midday from the slow train at Grunow. It was a bitterly cold winter morning, sunny and clear, with a numbing east wind. The countryside east of Berlin has a delicate ...
Steel, Stalin and socialism
The erstwhile steeltowns of Russia and eastern Europe may not seem obvious tourist destinations, but hidden europe takes a look at four such ...
Changing horizons for Silvertown (London)
Rathbone Street market in Canning Town, just two stops up the train line from Silvertown, was the furthest most Silvertowners ever ventured. A Saturday special. Pie and mash at Mrs Olley's café followed by ice cream at Murkoff's were Canning Town ...
Cultural landscapes in the Veneto
Venice may come with a constellation of superlatives, but head out into the Veneto to find a world apart. The country around Treviso, just a dozen miles inland from Venice, is classic città diffusa territory. As if in retort to Venice's urban ...