This was my first walk in Luxembourg. It is part of Route 3 on the Mullerthal Trail, a 112km maze of trails on the German border. The full route was a 38km round loop but I had no intention of doing that to my feet. I just wanted to get the lay of the land, soak up the scenery and figure out how accurate my map-reading was.
The land was easy-going, mostly flat although there were quite a few steep climbs when you travelled in and out of river valleys. The scenery was lush. The woods were predominantly bright green and Autumn had just taken hold. The floor was golden brown, a mix of fallen russet leaves, pine needles and the orange sand that makes up the soil here. November is probably the best month if you want the complete Golden Leaves experience but you would have to balance that with the rain. I’d say the loamy soil is a nightmare to walk in after downpours but I didn’t have that problem during my trip. It looked like Luxembourg enjoyed the hot continental Summer so it was very dry underfoot.
I entered the woods from my cosy accommodation at Auberge Rustique at 9.00am and it was 10.45 am before I walked into an unbroken section of sky with no trees above me. As I was walking mainly through Beech woods I was accompanied by birdsong, the crunching underfoot of nuts on the ground and the crackshot noise of branches snapping in the canopy. For someone who lives in a country that only has 11% of forest cover and the majority of that is monotonous conifer, this was pretty amazing. In Japan, people do shinnrin-yoku, or Forest Bathing. In Ireland, the most we can do is dip our toes now and again. The Mullerthal Trail was like being submerged under a wavy green world with shafts of light cutting through from above.
The first section of my walk gave a brief taste of the Sandstone cliffs that lined the trails in the Mullerthal. They were carved out of the soil millions of years ago and their grey-green towers were a wonderful contrast to the unending woods. The cliffs were worn smooth in places or pockmarked with honeycomb erosion and craggy enough to earn this location the nickname Little Switzerland. They gave plenty of grip to creepers, ivys and long slender limbs that sprouted off ledges. After a while walking you could easily slip into thinking that these were giant rock creatures resting. A lot of the rocks and cliffs had hollows and hidey-holes that served as Marian shrines or World War 2 bunkers used by the locals to evade the Nazis. Today they are mostly used by bats and birds.
It wasn’t all woodland on this route. Now and again I would emerge from the edge of a forest on a trail through farmland. Like the rest of Luxembourg, the farms were neat and tidy, smooth as golf-courses and with a Tellytubbie feel to them. Apple trees were conveniently located along the trail for snacking, usually beside bus-stops. Buses are free in Luxembourg. No apps, no tickets, no coins – just go where you like. What is not to love about a country with free public transport?
I walked to Larochette, another village with a hillside castle, a few coffee shops and plenty of benches on the slopes to sit and soak up the scenery. From there I carried on to Blumenthal. This was basically a hamlet with a bus-stop. The highpoint of the day for me was stopping to admire a golden brown blaze of ferns that broke up the bright green woodland and suddenly realising that there were three fawny coloured deer right in front of me who seemed just as shocked as I was that we had all managed to stop at this random point.
At Blumenthal I caught the bus back to Beaufort, after doing 24 km. I had done a map-reading course with Explore More earlier in the year and I was eager to see how I navigated in Europe with a fold-up map full of contour lines and symbols. I was not really sure how far I was going to go but I stuck to my proposed plan on paper and it all worked out the way I expected.
Day 2 will appear next.
Score: 9/10
Let me know if you know anything more about this route.
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