Ransbach-Baumbach

Ransbach-Baumbach fires the grey-and-blue heart of the Kannenbäckerland. The double town sits on Europe's richest clay — the Westerwald's vast deposits that named the whole district the "pot-bakers' land" — and its kilns have turned that clay into the celebrated salt-glazed stoneware for centuries: grey jugs with cobalt-blue decoration, the Westerwald ware that once travelled in trade barrels down the Rhine to the world's taverns and now signs itself in studio galleries and manufactory shops along the town's streets. Ransbach-Baumbach carries the title Kannenbäckerstadt with workshop pride, its potters' market and ceramic road connecting it to the district's museums and schools of the craft.

Industry refined the inheritance in two directions: clay-processing and ceramics plants on the working side, and glass on the festive one — the town is home to a leading maker of drinkware whose printed glasses toast in stadiums and breweries across Europe, a neat completion of the local monopoly on vessels.

Around the kilns, the Westerwald does its quiet work: basalt heights and beech woods, the Alsbach valley's paths, pilgrimage chapels and club life in the districts, with Koblenz and the Rhine half an hour downhill. Montabaur's castle and the autobahn bring the century in; the clay pits keep the millennia available. Earth into jugs, sand into glasses: Ransbach-Baumbach has always known what to do with its ground.