By the time we reached Dreiborn, the landscape had changed again. We were now well inside the northern Eifel, surrounded by high ground, fields and forest rather than the flatter parts of Germany we had crossed earlier.
We arrived in Dreiborn and then had to decide what was actually worth doing in the area. At first the village itself looks small enough to pass through quickly, but it sits in a surprisingly interesting position: immediately beside the Eifel National Park, close to Vogelsang and on the edge of the huge open landscape known as the Dreiborner Hochfläche.
The name Dreiborn literally points to one of the oldest features of the place. Born is an old German word for a spring or source, and Dreiborn refers to three springs. The castle was recorded in 1334 under the French-looking name Troys Fontainez, meaning Three Fountains.
The settlement itself is probably considerably older. Dreiborn grew beside the old Roman route between Cologne and Reims, and the castle site may have existed in some form for roughly a thousand years.
Burg Dreiborn is particularly unusual because it is a moated castle high in the Eifel. It is regarded locally as the highest water castle in the Rhineland. Its rectangular castle island is surrounded by a moat supplied by the springs that gave Dreiborn its name.
For centuries it was not just a country residence. Dreiborn was the centre of a substantial local lordship within the Duchy of Jülich, and at different points the area around it was divided between different jurisdictions. Even the main road through the village once formed part of a local boundary.
The village also sits on a watershed. Water on one side eventually runs towards the Olef, while on the other it drains towards the Rur. That does not look especially dramatic when driving through Dreiborn, but it explains why the surrounding plateau is so open and why several of the Eifel’s major reservoirs lie not far away.
The most important landscape is the Dreiborner Hochfläche.
Today it forms one of the most distinctive sections of the Eifel National Park: broad open grassland and scrub with long views across the hills. But for most of the twentieth century this was not an ordinary recreational landscape.
It was military ground.
After the Second World War, a large area around Vogelsang and Dreiborn became part of the Vogelsang military training area. Belgian forces used it for decades, which meant that large sections of the countryside were closed to the public.
That military use had an unexpected effect. Because the land was not intensively farmed or developed, large areas remained open. When military activity finally ended and the Eifel National Park was created in 2004, the former training ground became one of the most unusual landscapes inside the new park.
The Dreiborner Hochfläche was opened to visitors after the Belgian military left in 2005.
There is an important restriction even now: visitors need to remain on the marked routes. Parts of the former training area can still contain unexploded military ammunition, so leaving the paths is not simply discouraged for environmental reasons.
In other words, the empty-looking grassland around Dreiborn has a much more complicated history than it appears to have.
Then there is Vogelsang.
From Dreiborn, the former Ordensburg Vogelsang is only a short journey away. It is difficult to describe it simply as an attraction because its history is deliberately uncomfortable.
The enormous complex was built during the Nazi period as one of the Ordensburgen intended to train a future political leadership elite for the regime. Architecture was used on a monumental scale to express authority, hierarchy and National Socialist ideology.
After the war the site became British and then Belgian military property, forming part of the training area around Dreiborn.
Today it has been deliberately turned into something completely different. Vogelsang IP is an international education and documentation centre. The original buildings remain, but exhibitions explain what the place was intended to do and how the young men selected for training there were supposed to become part of the Nazi leadership system.
That distinction matters. Vogelsang is preserved not as a celebration of the architecture but as evidence of how architecture, education and ideology were used by the dictatorship.
At the same time, it sits in one of the most impressive positions in the Eifel, high above the Urft reservoir and surrounded by the national park. The contrast is difficult to miss: an enormous complex created by a dictatorship now stands inside a protected landscape whose guiding principle is to allow nature to develop with as little human intervention as possible.
The National Park uses the German phrase Natur Natur sein lassen — essentially, letting nature be nature.
That idea is especially visible around Dreiborn because the national park is still relatively young. This is not an ancient untouched wilderness. Much of it was previously commercial forest, farmland or military terrain. Spruce plantations are gradually being replaced by more natural woodland, dead trees are increasingly left in place and ecological processes are being allowed to continue without everything being tidied or controlled.
The area supports wildcats, red deer, black storks and numerous other species. September is particularly associated with the red-deer rut, and Dreiborn even has a covered observation platform on the edge of the village for watching deer without disturbing them.
There is another strange remnant of the military period nearby: Wollseifen.
This was once a normal Eifel village. After the Second World War, however, its inhabitants were ordered to leave because the area was incorporated into the military training ground. Houses were subsequently damaged or demolished during military exercises.
The former village can now be reached on foot across the Dreiborner Hochfläche. A few structures remain, including the church, together with purpose-built military structures that make clear how the abandoned settlement was later used for training.
It is one of the more unusual walks in the region because it combines an attractive open landscape with evidence of an entire community that was removed from it.
That was what made arriving in Dreiborn more interesting than we first expected. It is a small village, and nothing in the centre immediately suggests that there is enough nearby to fill a substantial part of a day.
But almost everything around it has another layer.
The village name comes from three springs. The old castle is one of the highest moated castles in the Rhineland. A Roman road once passed this way. The apparently natural plateau was a military training ground. A nearby village was emptied of its population. An enormous Nazi training complex became a Belgian military base and is now a centre for historical education. And around all of this, one of Germany’s comparatively young national parks is slowly trying to turn managed land back into something closer to wilderness.
For us, Dreiborn began simply as a place where we had arrived and needed to decide where to go next.
Once we looked around properly, the difficult part was no longer finding something to do. It was deciding which part of the history and landscape to follow first.