Bavaria · Old Town
Wasserburg am Inn
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Wasserburg am Inn is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Wasserburg 1,500 points
Stepped gables on the neck of land, right where the peninsula stops being a peninsula. Whoever held this held the bridge, the salt and the town. The lane called Auf der Burg runs straight through it.
Brucktor 500 points
The gate you pass through on the way to the bridge, four storeys of it, wedged between the old hospital and the town house. Look up as you go under.
Frauenkirche 500 points
The smaller church, standing right in the market space instead of beside it, with a slim tower over a hall you walk through.
St. Jakob 500 points
Unrendered brick with a tower of tuff blocks, set in the crook between castle hill and town, out of the water's reach. The parish church stands apart from the market on purpose.
Hungerturm 250 points
A square tower with battlements at the top of Im Hag, planted where the town's defences turned a corner. It has windows now, which tells you most of what became of it.
Mauthaus 250 points
A corner house at the market with vaulted arcades at street level, standing where the road bends. Money changed hands here for centuries.
Pulverturm 250 points
A squat tower at the western corner of the old defences. The street that runs past it gives the game away, which saves me the trouble.
Rathaus 250 points
Two stepped gables of unequal height on Marienplatz, one wider and taller than its neighbour. Step inside and look down. I am not telling you why.
Name origin
Why it is called Wasserburg am Inn.
Wasserburg is a castle in the water, and the name says exactly that. The castle is first named in 1085. Within the next fifty years the counts moved their seat here from Limburg, onto a tongue of land the Inn wraps around on three sides. The water came first. The name is just bookkeeping.
Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-wasserburg.de, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
On a spoon. The Inn loops almost the whole way round the Old Town, and what is left is a neck of land at the west end with a castle sitting on it. The walls and the rows of houses trace that tongue exactly. Three sides water, one side a gate.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1
Why then
When the first stone went down.
Wasserburg is one of the Inn-Salzach towns that Upper Bavaria laid out to plan in the thirteenth century. They were built as economic and political footholds, and as staging yards for salt and grain behind a wall. The town has a judge of its own by 1323 and its town law by 1334. Of all these river towns, Wasserburg keeps the most complete late Gothic face on a medieval ground plan.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1, www.historisches-lexikon-wasserburg.de
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 1085–1247
The counts who moved in here were also the Hallgrafen of Reichenhall, which means salt counts, which means the family that held the saltworks everything on this river was carrying. The line ended with Count Konrad. He had named his cousin the Bavarian duke as his heir, the two of them fell out, and in November 1247 the town went to the duke anyway.
Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-wasserburg.de, www.historisches-lexikon-wasserburg.de
- 1247–
From 1247 the dukes of Bavaria hold the town, and they never really hand it back. The salt privileges come from them, and so does the rebuilt wall of 1415. It is still Bavaria today, which after nearly eight hundred years I would call settled.
Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-wasserburg.de, www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1
The emblem
What the shield means.
A rearing lion with a crown. It turns up first on a seal impression from 1292, cut around the middle of that century, and it has barely changed since. The lion is Wittelsbach, taken from the dukes, but Wasserburg wore it alone: no other town in the duchy of Bavaria carried a lion and nothing else at that time. Red and white are the old colours, first painted on a window in the town hall.
Sources: www.historisches-lexikon-wasserburg.de
Emblem: Public domain — official coat of arms (Wikimedia Commons)
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
The counts who built the castle here were also the Hallgrafen of Reichenhall. Hall means salt. They were, in plain modern German, the salt counts, and they held the saltworks whose goods went down this river.
Look at the town from the south east, across the water, and you are looking at Merian's engraving of 1657. The heritage register says the agreement between the two is still strong. Six centuries of building, and the skyline kept its shape.
Sources: www.geodaten.bayern.de p. 1
In 1950 the council renamed the Ledererzeile to Ledererstraße. The local history society and the heritage office objected, because an old street name is evidence, and the council took it back at the next meeting. The tanners keep their row.
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- Zeile
- A row. Here it is a whole street named for the trade that worked it: Bäckerzeile, Ledererzeile, Salzsenderzeile, Schmidzeile. Four trades, four courses.
- Zipfel
- A pointed end, from the Middle High German zipf. The Weberzipfel was a dead end until 1852, when a new street broke through below the castle. It has a way out now. I liked it better closed.
- Gries
- Sand and gravel, from the Middle High German griez. The Gries is ground the Inn made by putting down what it carried. The town used it as a staging yard and a cattle market. Land the river built, and then people stood on it.
- Durchgang
- A passage cut straight through a block of houses. Allwang, Bauerschweizer, Greinbräu. Short, covered, and there are dots in them.
- Gasse
- The ordinary word for a street here, and there are plenty. Count the names ending in -gasse and you have walked most of the Old Town.
The size of it
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 58streets
- 587dots
- 9.8km of street
- 12.7km on foot
- 3.6hours at a stroll
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.