Hohe Brücke (High Bridge)

About this place

On the road climbing from the town of **Kerns** in canton Obwalden towards the Melchtal valley, a driver suddenly passes through a covered wooden box — and only on stopping and getting out realises it stands over **a hundred metres of empty air**. Below is a narrow ravine cut by the Melchaa on its way down from the Melchsee, and above it what is described as **the highest covered wooden bridge in Europe**. Its building story is stranger than its looks: it was put up by the **Swiss army in 1943**, at the height of the Second World War, when Switzerland was ringed by the Axis powers and kept its soldiers busy on domestic works. Sixteen men finished it in thirty-six days **without machinery**; it weighs around a hundred tonnes and is only thirty metres long — all that effort for thirty metres horizontally and a hundred vertically. It replaced an older bridge designed by a local Kerns carpenter in 1893. Be realistic about it: this is a ten-minute stop, not a day out. But it sits in country worth half a day if you combine it with **Flüeli-Ranft**, a few kilometres away in the same valley, where Nicholas of Flüe ("Brother Klaus") lived as a hermit in the fifteenth century and became Switzerland's patron saint — one of the country's most important places of pilgrimage, after Einsiedeln.