If I cannot claim to have felt the spirit of the place in that fashion, it may be because seventy years have reduced the ruins to a yet more ruinous state, and so the illusion that the king might still be here anxious for “tydings” is little likely to arise. Though the little town itself is attractive, it is of course the ruined fortress that makes the strongest appeal, historically and sentimentally, to the British visitor. Whether approached by way of the scattered rocks on the eastern side, or by the pathway which leads from near within the “ponderous gateway” (to the town, not to the castle) up to the ruins, we find ourselves on the conical summit of rugged rock standing out at the end of a mountain spur among the sadly battered remains of the old castle. Here and there are great pieces of wall still standing, but the whole is in a time-battered, broken state which makes it difficult to recall the plan of the place. One tall piece of wall looks afar off curiously like a gigantic figure, and near at hand but little imagination is necessary to see in it the figure of the great crusader himself! The view from the castle ruins up the river towards Weissenkirchen across to the mountain-surrounded level on which Rossatz stands and down-stream across a hemmed-in vine-grown battlefield towards Vienna, with the great monastery of Gottweih on a conical hill in the distance, is a most attractive one; while between the ruins and the mountains is a narrow gorge, with beyond it the jagged edge of the extraordinary rock mass where a large part of it was blasted to make the railway which now runs though the hill on which Dürrenstein Castle stands. In the centre of the ruins is a gigantic, more or less roughly cubic, mass of granite out of which a windowless chamber has been roughly hewn, and here, says tradition, is the veritable prison in which Richard was confined by his implacable enemy, Duke Leopold of Austria.