Préizerdaul was another of the smaller places we encountered while travelling through western Luxembourg, and our first impression came from a very practical point of view. On 4 September we stopped at the parking area in the centre with our motorhome. It seemed perfectly adequate for a short break along the road, but we did not consider it a particularly good place for remaining much longer. During the daytime it was noticeably noisy because of the busy road nearby, and that made quite a difference to the atmosphere. The car park itself was also rather small and narrow, although even with a larger motorhome it was still usable. It was therefore not a bad stop, but for us it worked much better as somewhere to pause than as somewhere to settle for a long stay.
That first impression actually reflects something important about Préizerdaul: the road is central to the way the place developed. Préizerdaul is not really one compact historic village in the conventional sense. The modern commune is made up of Bettborn, Platen, Pratz and Reimberg, together with the smaller hamlets of Horas and Roudbaach, and the villages gradually grew towards one another along the valley. Today it can be difficult to tell exactly where one section finishes and the next begins.
The name itself is relatively recent as an official municipal name. Until 2001 the commune was formally called Bettborn. A law of 17 July 2001 changed the official name to Préizerdaul, recognising the name that had long been used for the valley and the group of communities within it. This makes it quite an unusual Luxembourg municipality: Préizerdaul is not simply the name of one dominant village that absorbed its neighbours, but the shared name of the wider valley community.
The area’s history reaches much farther back. The municipality records evidence from Celtic and Roman times, including an early La Tène burial, Roman coins, villas and other archaeological finds. Pratz and Platen have roots connected with the Roman period, while Reimberg developed as a Frankish settlement. Bettborn followed a somewhat different path. According to the municipality’s historical account, there was already a sacred site in the area in Celtic times, and a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary was established there in the seventh century. Houses only gradually developed around it afterwards.
For much of the feudal period the valley was administered through the Haff Proz, an estate connected with the provostship of Arlon. The villages were therefore historically tied westwards towards what is now Belgium as well as towards the rest of Luxembourg. Ecclesiastically, the area originally depended on the parish of Ospern, and the inhabitants of Bettborn had a long-running dispute with the parish priest over the obligation to celebrate Sunday Mass in the local chapel.
The political organisation changed completely after the arrival of French administration at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1800 the new municipality of Bettborn was established, and the notary Anton Knaas became its first mayor. The choice of Bettborn as the municipal name was not really the result of it being the largest or historically most important settlement. Knaas had built his house close to the church and used it as the administrative headquarters, and the name simply remained attached to the municipality.
This helps explain why the later change to Préizerdaul was more than a cosmetic renaming. The older name represented an administrative decision made around two centuries earlier, while Préizerdaul described the valley and the group of communities much more naturally.
The nineteenth century gradually brought those communities physically closer together. One particularly important moment came in 1847, when a new section of the state road between Reichel and Grosbous was constructed as part of a route intended to improve connections between Arlon and Ettelbruck. The road ran lengthways through the valley and connected Platen, Bettborn and Pratz much more directly.
Building land beside the new road was relatively inexpensive, so houses gradually appeared along it. The empty spaces separating the villages began to disappear. The municipality’s own historical account describes this process as the moment when the separate valley villages slowly started to form one continuous whole — the Préizerdaul.
That makes the road noise we noticed during our stop a slightly ironic part of the place’s story. The road was one of the reasons the individual villages grew together in the first place, and today it remains the principal route through the settlement. For a motorhome stop beside it, however, the traffic was exactly why we did not find the location ideal for staying longer.
The same nineteenth century also brought other changes. In 1842 the valley was granted four markets, while bridges were constructed at Pratz. Improved roads and bridges reduced the isolation of the individual settlements and made the valley increasingly function as one community rather than several neighbouring villages.
Bettborn became the religious and administrative focus. The present arrangement around the church and municipal buildings still reflects this role. Yet the other villages retained their own identities, and this is still visible in the modern commune. Reimberg, for example, lies farther east and is surrounded by countryside and woodland, while Pratz and Platen form other distinct parts of the valley.
The landscape becomes rural very quickly once the main road is left behind. Fields, wooded hills and narrow lanes surround the settlements, making Préizerdaul considerably more peaceful away from the traffic corridor than our parking experience initially suggested.
Reimberg is particularly useful for discovering that side of the commune. A Guttland Trail starts there, giving access to the wooded countryside north of the village. Walking routes are an important part of this region of western Luxembourg, and the landscape is gentle rather than dramatic: farmland, small valleys, woods and scattered villages rather than the deep rocky gorges found farther east in the country.
There is also an interesting connection with geology. Michel Lucius, one of Luxembourg’s important twentieth-century geologists, was born in Reimberg in 1876. His work contributed significantly to the geological understanding of Luxembourg, and a monument to him was inaugurated locally in 1966. The municipality later created the Michel Lucius geological circuit, continuing the association between the scientist and his home valley.
The commune also developed some surprisingly early environmental projects. Two wind turbines at Reimberg entered service in 2003, while a woodchip heating plant was introduced the following year to supply municipal buildings, the school, church and some private houses. These are relatively small details compared with the much older history of the valley, but they show how this rural municipality continued to change without becoming an urban centre.
For us, however, Préizerdaul remained above all a brief stop rather than a destination where we spent a long period. The central parking place did its job: despite being a little small and narrow, it could still accommodate our motorhome without any serious problem. The difficulty was the location beside the busy road. During the day the traffic made it noisy enough that we would not have chosen it for a long stay.
That did not mean there was anything fundamentally wrong with the place. It simply fitted one particular purpose better than another. For a short rest while crossing western Luxembourg, it was absolutely usable. For a quieter stop, the countryside surrounding the valley would have appealed to us considerably more.
Préizerdaul also turned out to be more interesting historically than its appearance from the main road might suggest. What looks today like a continuous ribbon of houses is actually the result of several old communities gradually growing together. Celtic and Roman evidence, a Frankish settlement, a medieval estate, a seventh-century chapel, a Napoleonic municipality and a nineteenth-century road all contributed to creating the place that officially became Préizerdaul only in 2001.
It was therefore another good example of something we repeatedly found in Luxembourg: even an apparently ordinary stop along the road can have a surprisingly complicated history behind it. Our own experience of Préizerdaul was simple — useful for a short stop, rather noisy for anything longer, with a car park that was small but still manageable for a larger motorhome — but the valley around it has been developing as a shared community for centuries.