Cuckoo Clock - Blog Posts
Now that @fredomotophoto is back from Alsace and Germany, I can do a piece on Black Forest clocks without spoiling his trip! The area has a lot of clock-making history, and to this day, typical tourist shops like the one above - TriBär, a play on the town of Triberg and the word Bär which... you can guess, a.k.a the House of 1000 Clocks - are full of cuckoo clocks ticking and going off all the time. It probably gets quite weird working in one of those places...
Triberg is host to the most extreme cuckoo clocks. The world's smallest are housed in the Schwarzwaldmuseum in the town centre. Wall camera on the right for scale.
Further up into the hills, on the edge of Schonach, is the opposite: this is world's first largest cuckoo clock, referenced in this previous post. As it was closed on the day I visited, I don't know much about the history of this clock, but it's housed in a building the size of a small house (gate on the right for scale)... and it isn't the biggest one any more.
The current biggest one is on the other side of Triberg, and located at the base of a big climb on the Schwarzwald Railway Adventure Trail. Gate on the right for scale. The whole building doesn't count as the clock itself (that would be too easy), only the mechanism does, and it is 4.5 m wide, with an 8 m pendulum. It took 5 years to build and its cost is estimated in the millions of euros, so you know what you're in for if you want to beat it. For a small fee, it is possible to visit the interior, but I was a bit pressed for time as I didn't want to miss the next train at the next viewpoint. I just took a break in the shop and caught the 5 o'clock cuckoo before moving on.
Bonus clock from the museum:
A few more odds and sods from Triberg. I'm not going to show much more because someone commented on a previous post saying that they will visit Triberg in June, so I'm not going to spoil everything for them, particularly regarding cuckoo clocks.
The Black Forest is well known for its cuckoo clocks, and Triberg is home to the most extreme: the largest, which is a possible stop on the Railway Adventure Trail we covered yesterday, and the smallest, which are housed in the Schwarzwald Museum. But there is also a "first biggest cuckoo clock"... in Schonach. This would be the first clock to be recognised as the biggest by the well-known record book, but it has since been overtaken by the one in Triberg.
It's closed on Mondays, so all I have is this photo from the main road between Triberg and Schonach - in which I've cropped out the clock on the left. The clock is on the old road between the two towns, which is much nicer and at times bucolic. Schonach has a ski jumping hill which I'd like to visit, but didn't manage to fit it in on my one-day trip.
Between the waterfalls and the first biggest cuckoo clock is the Bergsee, a tiny lake with a simple café-restaurant on its edge - decent food, calmer* and not as pricey as downtown Triberg. The lake served as an alternate venue for ice-skating competitions in the 1920s, when Berlin wasn't cold enough!
