St Georgen am Walde (St George in the Woods) is an extremely obscure village of 500 people in the Mühlviertel that even few Austrian people have reason to go to. It’s hard to get to, and when I left I had to get in a minibus with the kids from work that went round all the farms.
To get there I had to catch a bus from Linz Chemiepark, one of the most depressing places on earth. About ten miles to the right of that factory was Mauthausen concentration camp, where they used to work people to death in the granite quarry.
There are few train stations in the Mühlviertel, and many places are accessed by a network of buses that hurtle round hair pin bends on narrow forest roads, the drivers blissfully unaware of how queasy any non-local passengers are, as they bomb around this route multiple times a day.
This was my hotel. We were the only guests, and the bar and restaurant was only open at the weekends. Getting meals was a problem in St Georgen, because the chef at the only other place to eat for miles around went down with COVID, and we had no access to a kitchen. At least the school did soups and things at lunch. I ate so much bread.
“The Secret of the Swimming Hotels”
A Jack in the Green seemed a fitting thing to draw here.
This was the bus stop opposite the hotel.
There was a pond in the school library with a taxidermied otter in it.
A birthday poem in dialect outside someone’s house. “Anna is now 18. Last year you were an idiot.”
The only source of food in the village.
This was the local museum, on the side of the road. Unstaffed.
There wasn’t much else to do except go for walks. The altitude in town is 787m, but up in the hills is 900m+ the same as the top of Scafell Pike. All that tells you is that England is a bit pathetic when it comes to mountains.
The village lives up to its name.
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