The two-metre pinch
Two-hundred-metre walls nearly touching — the gallery between.
Pazit Polak — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Falk2 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Falk2 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wiktoria Kobus — CC BY-SA 4.0
Train from Interlaken Ost (45 minutes along turquoise Brienz), the gorge from the east by its little railway, walking through westward to town, lunch and meringues in their homeland — then the vintage Reichenbach funicular to the falls and Holmes ledge, his small museum on the square for devotees. A summer return by Brienz steamer instead of train crowns the day.
Set summer evenings (mostly July–August Wednesdays and Saturdays) the gorge opens after dark in immersive coloured light — walls as light-theatre, water lacquer-black: an utterly different edition worth planning for. Dates yearly on its site.
Doyle loved Meiringen as holidaymaker and wanted his hero a 'worthy grave': hurling him with Moriarty into the Reichenbach in 1893 to free himself for 'serious' writing — readers mourned in revolt until he resurrected him a decade on. The town lives the legacy with Holmes's statue, square and the falls' marked ledge — Sherlockians' first world pilgrimage.
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Through fourteen thousand years the Aare has slit its strait in Meiringen's limestone: a kilometre and four hundred metres of two-hundred-metre walls closing to two, glacial turquoise running the floor — and wooden galleries of 1889 nailed to the cliff cross the whole slit in an easy, flat walk fitting every age. Light drops in ribbons from the upper crack igniting the water's colours, and the passages alternate: cavern-dark, then open sky, then tight against the current — nature's engineering with Switzerland's habitual perfect staging. It neighbours the Reichenbach Falls where Conan Doyle 'killed' Holmes — the vintage funicular still climbs to them — so Meiringen (the meringue's homeland too) makes a scene-dramatic half-day, three quarters of an hour by train from Interlaken.
Two-hundred-metre walls nearly touching — the gallery between.
The upper crack's light firing the turquoise in dancing bands.
Cliff-nailed galleries in surviving nineteenth-century elegance.
Aareschlucht, 3860 Meiringen