At first glance, Wolfach in Germany looks nothing like the literary template of an enchanted, perilous forest. There are no brooding woods, lurking wolves or gingerbread houses waiting to lure unsuspecting travellers. The clear, sunny skies of Wolfach offer not the tiniest hint of what lies ahead.
The historic town sits prettily at the confluence of the Wolf and Kinzig rivers, in the heart of the Central Black Forest. Just a few steps from the Lower Gate, a surviving relic of the town’s 12th-century fortifications, the Schlossblick trail—literally, castle-view trail—begins its gentle ascent.
It steepens, the trees close in, and the path turns rough and, leads to a clearing known as the Witches’ Landing. Time, perhaps, for the dark secrets of Schwarzwald—the Black Forest.
Except, as Milena Santos von Zelewski, the trail leader, explains, there is no dark secret at all.
“There is no fairytale connection here,” she says. “Some 40 years back, a group of women from the Women’s League II 1866 Wolfach started hiking up the mountain every Friday to train for their yearly Alpine trip. The locals affectionately started calling them ‘mountain witches’.” The women eventually claimed the moniker as their own.
“Though people were always living here, amid the forest, no one from outside came. Even the Romans skirted around it. Owing to the dense canopy of trees, the sunlight hardly reached the floor. All that led to the mysticism and black magic tales,” says Karen Smallman of the museum.
The forest’s darkness was not merely a product of folklore. Today, even if the world does not know all the secrets of the Black Forest, it certainly knows two of its most delicious exports: Black Forest Gateau and cuckoo clocks.
Perhaps the forest’s greatest trick is not that it is dark. It is that it can be sunny, charming and delicious—and still make you look over your shoulder.