Journal of a Tour in the Years 1828-1829, through Styria, Carniola, and Italy, whilst Accompanying the Late Sir Humphry DavyTobin, J. J.
History
Journal of a Tour in the Years 1828-1829, through Styria, Carniola, and Italy, whilst Accompanying the Late Sir Humphry Davy
Tobin, J. J.
Davy, Humphry, Sir, 1778-1829; Europe -- Description and travel
At nine o'clock we left Werfen, and crossing the Salza drove on through
some very pretty villages to Itan, a little hamlet, where we had to
wait a considerable time for horses, the Archduke John having passed
through but a few hours before, on his road from the baths of Gastein
to Grätz. From Itan we proceeded to Radstadt, and from thence along our
former road to Unter-Tauern.
_15th._ This morning was rainy, but in spite of this I preferred
walking up the mountain, to the slow pace at which the carriage
ascended with four horses and two oxen. The rain ceased in about an
hour, but the distant views, on our former descent so beautiful, were
now all veiled in mist and cloud. We passed two very fine falls, one
of them a little out of the road, which Sir Humphry got out to see. It
is called Prince John's Fall, and is a cascade of from three to four
hundred feet high, and is well worth seeing.
On arriving at Auf-dem-Tauern, the little village near the summit of
the pass, we found the fields and the greater part of the surrounding
Alps, which when we passed the first time were hidden as far as the
eye could reach in snow, now richly clad with fine grass and alpine
flowers. The road descending to Tweng is formed of white primary
marble, mixed with mica-schist. At Tweng we struck into a cross road to
Tamsweg, a large village lying in a fine broad valley, in the middle
of which runs a branch of the Murr, which we have followed from the
very peak of the Tauern. The inn here was very bad. In the evening I
went to the village doctor for some medicine for Sir Humphry, who told
me that this valley was one of the highest in Austria, the village
itself lying three thousand and twenty-two Paris feet above the level
of the sea, and that the pass of the Tauern was rather more than two
thousand feet higher.
_16th._ We left Tamsweg this morning, and drove on, over abominable
roads, to Murrau, a dirty little town on the Murr. Sir Humphry said
he should stay a day here to see if he could shoot some quails, or
catch any huchos[D] in the river, and he went out immediately after we
arrived, about two o'clock, but found no quails. The Murr forms a very
pretty cascade about a mile below the town.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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