Kirn

Kirn keeps its castle stocked with whisky. The Kyrburg, the Wild- and Rhinegraves' ruined fortress on its cone above the town, shelters in its vaulted cellars a whisky museum of many hundreds of bottles — malt pilgrims climb past bastions to compare drams where knights once garrisoned, and the terrace pays in views over the Nahe hills. Below, the town answers with its own venerable pour: the Kirner brewery, in family hands since the eighteenth century, is among the Nahe region's proudest names, its beer the local currency of festivity.

Kirn earned its living for centuries in leather — tanneries strung along the Hahnenbach powered a trade that shod and belted half of Germany until the industry wandered; the stately tanners' and merchants' houses, the church of St Pankratius above the market with its Wildgrave tombs, and the compact lanes between river and rock keep the working-town dignity.

The surroundings are the secret splendour: up the Hahnenbach valley lie the slate-built village of Bundenbach with its Celtic Altburg reconstruction and fossil slates, and the Schmidtburg's extensive ruins — robber-baron country turned hiking idyll on the Soonwald's edge, with the Nahe's vineyards and the gemstone towns of Idar-Oberstein a short ride downstream. A castle of whisky, a town of leather and beer, valleys of slate and legend: Kirn distils the Hunsrück borderlands neatly.