Cologne; Sunday, 17 June, 2018

Given it was going to be a long journey at the end of the day, with the chances of being in bed by midnight remote, I had a nice long lie in to make sure I was fully refreshed for the day ahead.

After a quick breakfast I packed, checked out and headed out into town to explore the city’s walls. The walls around Cologne were once around 7Km long and included 12 towers. Today only a handful of the towers/gates still survive and most of the wall has gone, destroyed when the city needed to expand beyond it’s medieval core. Today the course of the wall is shadowed by the inner city ring road, and – more conveniently for me, by the 12 and 15 tram lines, making visiting the sites on the wall much easier than having to trudge for kilometres between sites.

First stop was out to Eberplatz and the remains of the Eigelstein-Torburg, the northern most of the surviving city walls and today hidden in a small square. From there it was back onto the tram and down a couple of stops to Rudolfplatz and the Hahen gate. Here it is just the gate that has survived, with none of the wall remaining either side, but as with all the other gates that have survived it has been restored and is in use, with most of the gates being looked after by the city’s carnival societies.

Back down onto the U-Bahn and a couple of stops further on to Ulrepforte where some of the largest parts of the remains survive. The Ulrepforte itself is a tower, looking to all intents and purposes like it had just come out of a fairy-tale. A short distance away the Sachsenturm and a small part of the wall has been preserved to give an idea of how impressive it would have been in its heyday.

One more stop round on the tram and at Chlodwigplatz the Severinstorburg, the most impressive of the remaining gates, if only for the small part of wall that remains attached to it.

Having taken in all of the wall and gates that exist I stopped off at one of the cafes in Chlodwigplatz for a quick lunch before picking the tram back up and heading north, this time past Eberplatz and onto the Flora botanical gardens.

I had a long wander around the gardens, which would have been longer still had the glasshouses not been closed for renovation. From Flora I caught the tram back to the Hauptbahnhof to grab a quick bite to eat and then back to my hotel to collect my luggage, before returning to the Hauptbahnhof and starting the long journey back to my overnight stop for work in Oxford.