Across an Invisible Border: Seven Slow Days Between Bohemia and Bavaria

Borders look very clear on maps.

Landscapes are less obedient.

Drive west from the Czech city of Plzeň and the country slowly begins to change. Towns become smaller, forests larger and castles appear on isolated hills above old roads. Continue towards the German border and eventually a sign tells you that you have entered Bavaria.

The forest, however, carries on.

For centuries, western Bohemia and eastern Bavaria were not remote ends of two separate worlds. Roads crossed these hills carrying merchants, pilgrims, soldiers and ideas between Prague, Regensburg and Nuremberg. Radyně Castle, built under Emperor Charles IV, even had among its duties the protection of the trade route running through this landscape. Hrad Radyně

This week follows some of those old connections.

It is not a tour of as many castles as possible. We will stay in only two places, spend time walking, occasionally do very little, and cross the Czech-German border almost without ceremony.

The first four nights are in the Klatovy–Kdyně area of western Bohemia. Then we move once, across the border, and spend three nights around Falkenberg in Bavaria's Upper Palatinate.

Two countries.

One landscape.

Day 1 – Radyně, Vlčtejn and the road west

Begin outside Plzeň at Radyně.

Charles IV ordered the castle to be built between 1356 and 1361. Its original name was Karlskrone – Charles's Crown – although the German name never really caught on in Bohemia and the castle eventually took the name of its hill.

Its position explains everything.

Radyně stands high above the surrounding country, and its administrators were responsible for watching the important commercial route connecting Prague with Regensburg and Nuremberg. Hrad Radyně

From the tower, look west.

That is where we are going.

Continue only a short distance to Vlčtejn, a much smaller ruin hidden in a village. Don't expect another monumental royal castle. Its appeal is precisely the opposite: old stone walls, trees and a place that feels as though everyday life has simply grown around the Middle Ages.

Then leave the Plzeň area behind and continue towards your accommodation around Klatovy or Kdyně.

You are staying for four nights.

Unpack properly.

Tomorrow morning there will be no suitcase waiting by the door.

Day 2 – Švihov, Klenová and a castle surrounded by water

Today belongs to two very different castles.

Start at Švihov.

Unlike the romantic image of a castle balancing on an inaccessible mountain, Švihov sits almost defiantly in flat country beside the Úhlava river.

That was not a defensive mistake.

The late Gothic castle was deliberately constructed as an artificial island. Its central buildings were protected by walls, bastions and two moats supplied by the river. Even more appropriately for our journey, an old trade route from Bavaria followed the Úhlava valley here. Hrad Švihov

Walk around it slowly. From some angles it seems less like a castle beside water than a fortress emerging from it.

Then continue to Klenová.

Here the atmosphere changes completely.

The castle occupies a wooded hill overlooking the countryside towards the Šumava foothills. Medieval ruins mingle with later architecture, and the surrounding landscape matters almost as much as the buildings themselves.

There is no reason to add a third major attraction.

Find somewhere for a late lunch. Wander. If it is summer, perhaps swim.

Then drive back to the same accommodation as yesterday.

By now, the roads around your temporary Czech home should already look a little familiar.

Day 3 – A day without collecting castles

A week devoted to historic borderlands does not require seven days of stone walls.

Spend today in the countryside towards Kdyně, Domažlice and the edge of the Bohemian Forest.

Choose a walk rather than an itinerary.

This landscape deserves one.

For centuries the mountains ahead were simultaneously a barrier and a passage. Routes threaded through them because people, goods and armies needed to get from Bohemia towards the Danube and back again.

But you do not need to spend the day thinking about history.

Walk through forest.

Stop in a village.

Have coffee in Domažlice if you feel like seeing a town, or simply stay in the countryside.

Most importantly, resist the temptation to fill the empty space.

Tomorrow we cross the border.

Day 4 – Falkenstein: the border disappears

Take the road west into Bavaria.

There will be a moment when Czech road signs become German ones. Perhaps your phone will welcome you to Germany.

Otherwise, remarkably little happens.

The hills continue. The villages continue. The forest certainly continues.

Eventually you reach Falkenstein, dominated by its castle high above the Bavarian market town.

The original itinerary on which this journey is based treated Falkenstein as the moment when the traveller left the Czech castle landscape and entered the Bavarian one. HRADY ZÁPADNÍCH ČECH A BAVORSKA

For us, it serves almost the opposite purpose.

Stand up there and look around.

Does this really feel like an entirely different world from the countryside you left this morning?

Of course there are differences. Architecture shifts subtly. Language changes. Food changes. Beer culture changes – although a Czech visitor may feel reassuringly at home on that particular subject.

But the landscape refuses to perform a dramatic transformation merely because politicians once drew a line through it.

Spend time in Falkenstein and the surrounding countryside before crossing back into Bohemia for one final evening in your first home.

Tomorrow, when we cross the border again, we will not come back for several days.

Day 5 – Crossing for real: towards Falkenberg

Pack your suitcase for the first time since arriving.

Today is not simply a transfer. The transfer is the journey.

Cross into Bavaria again and continue north through the Upper Palatinate towards Falkenberg.

Do not confuse it with yesterday's Falkenstein.

Falkenberg is a small historic market town dominated by a castle growing dramatically from a mass of granite above the River Waldnaab. The castle is first documented in 1154, although parts may be older. Over the centuries it belonged to the Falkenberg family, the Landgraves of Leuchtenberg, Waldsassen Abbey and later the Bavarian state. Markt Falkenberg

Its twentieth-century story is extraordinary too. Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg, a former German ambassador to Moscow, restored the castle before the Second World War. He later became involved in the resistance surrounding the 20 July 1944 attempt to overthrow Hitler and was executed by the Nazi regime. Markt Falkenberg

But Falkenberg has another attraction that may prove equally important after several days of castles.

It stands at the entrance to the Waldnaab Valley.

Check into your second home for three nights.

Then go for a walk through town.

You may notice a medieval streetscape, half-timbered houses and another Upper Palatinate tradition worth investigating: local Zoigl beer. Falkenberg still has a communal brewery associated with its production. Markt Falkenberg

Yesterday you were visiting Bavaria.

Tonight you live here.

There is a difference.

Day 6 – The Waldnaab Valley and the luxury of having nowhere else to be

Leave the car behind as much as possible today.

The protected Waldnaabtal stretches between Falkenberg and Windischeschenbach. The river cuts through granite country in a wooded valley of rocks, water and narrow paths; Falkenberg and Neuhaus castles stand near opposite ends of this landscape. Markt Falkenberg

This is your walking day.

Do not turn it into another checklist.

Follow the river. Stop when somewhere looks inviting. Eat when you are hungry.

And if you finish earlier than expected, that is not a logistical failure.

Return to Falkenberg and do something that becomes surprisingly pleasurable on a slow journey: go back to somewhere you already know.

The same inn.

The same street.

Perhaps the same beer.

Six days ago almost every place on this route was merely a name.

Now some of them have begun to acquire memories.

Day 7 – Back to Bohemia: Cheb, Loket and Krudum

Today we close the circle.

Cross the border once more and head for Cheb.

If any place on this journey makes modern national categories feel inadequate, it is this one.

Cheb Castle was transformed in the late twelfth century by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa into an imperial palace. It remains the only surviving example of this type of imperial castle architecture in today's Czech Republic, with its Black Tower and remarkable Romanesque-Gothic double chapel. Barbarossa himself stayed here several times. Hrad Cheb

In other words, after three nights in Bavaria, you have crossed into the Czech Republic only to arrive at one of the most striking monuments to the interconnected medieval world we have been travelling through all week.

Continue to Loket.

The Ohře almost completely surrounds the granite rock beneath the castle, giving the town its extraordinary setting. Even the earliest stone castle here may show architectural influences from neighbouring Bavaria. Hrad Loket

Have lunch. Walk through the town. Do not hurry.

Then, if daylight and your legs permit, make one final journey into the forest.

Near Krudum lie the excavated remains of the lost Church of St Nicholas.

The original itinerary called this place a kind of "Czech Troy": for generations stories survived about a vanished church in these forests before archaeological work revealed its foundations. HRADY ZÁPADNÍCH ČECH A BAVORSKA

Leave the car and walk.

After a week of towers, castles, imperial history and border crossings, there is something fitting about ending with almost nothing.

Trees.

A path.

Stone foundations in the forest.

And silence.

A border that matters – and doesn't

This journey is not intended to prove that Bohemia and Bavaria are the same.

They aren't.

Crossing the border changes language, architecture, habits, food and countless small details. Those differences are part of the pleasure.

But spend a week travelling slowly through this landscape and another truth becomes difficult to miss.

Borders separate countries much more neatly on maps than they separate history.

The trade routes watched from Radyně continued westwards. The Úhlava flowed past Švihov beside a route from Bavaria. Imperial politics reached Cheb. Architectural ideas crossed the mountains. Merchants crossed them. Armies crossed them. Ordinary people crossed them.

And the forests were here throughout.

Perhaps your strongest memory will be one of the castles.

Perhaps it will be the water around Švihov, the view from Falkenstein, the granite beneath Falkenberg or the Waldnaab flowing between trees.

Or perhaps it will simply be crossing the border and discovering how little the landscape cared.

Seven days. Two countries. Two temporary homes. And one old Central European landscape that never fitted comfortably inside a line on a map.