Saarschleife

Near the small town of Mettlach in Germany's Saarland, the Saar river turns almost completely back on itself. Besseringen and Mettlach stand only about two kilometres apart, yet the river takes a winding course of nearly ten kilometres between them, wrapping around a wooded ridge about 4 km long that rises to 318 m, some 150 m above the water. Seen from the Cloef lookout above the village of Orscholz, the river draws a tight, glinting U through unbroken forest, an image so familiar in the region that the bend is treated as the symbol of the Saarland.

The bend is a water gap: coming out of the soft red sandstone of the Merzig basin, the Saar runs into a band of hard quartzite, and why it never took the short route across remains unresolved. One explanation is that the quartzite already had an uneven relief before the sandstone settled over it; the river first meandered across the softer cover and then, as the land slowly rose, kept cutting down through the hard rock below. From the Cloef the stepped terraces of the inner slope still record that gradual incision. Beech grows on the patches of sandstone, hornbeam and oak on the quartzite, evergreen holly thrives in the mild climate, and the bare scree slopes carry only lichens and mosses.

The ridge has drawn people for millennia. A Celtic defensive wall crosses it, Roman traces have been found on the slopes, and around the year 1000 a noble family built a castle here that Archbishop Poppo of Trier captured and destroyed in 1016. A new fortress named Montclair, the bright mountain, was raised between 1180 and 1190, wrecked in 1351 in a conflict between Lorraine and Trier, and replaced by a smaller castle that was abandoned in 1620; its ruins were stabilised in the 19th century after Frederick William IV of Prussia took an interest. The hamlet of Dreisbach, the only settlement directly on the loop, is reached by ferry. Mettlach, at the end of the bend, grew around a Benedictine abbey and is the home of the ceramics maker Villeroy & Boch. Since 2016 a treetop walkway with an observation tower has risen above the Cloef.

Getting there

The Cloef viewpoint is at Orscholz, in the municipality of Mettlach; Merzig is about 9 km away. Mettlach station lies on the Saarbrücken–Trier railway. The nearest airport is Luxembourg-Findel (LUX), about 28 km away across the border; Saarbrücken Airport (SCN) is about 52 km away.