Inspired by a beautiful scene on a calendar last year and the fantastic day which dawned on Thursday, we took a bus to Hallstatt: a UNESCO World Heritage site.
They have ensured this beautiful village on the lake edge will be preserved, even to the extent of putting a tunnel through the mountain behind the village to provide a traffic bypass. The lake, Hallstattsee, was like glass and the boat trip which circles the lower end of the lake was a good way to see the village.
The wealth of the village came from their salt mines, which can be toured. We choose to visit the German equivalent on Friday.
Unique to this village, and forced on them by a lack of space to expand the church-yard, was the practice of exhuming skeletons after a period and storing the bones in the charnel house. This in itself is not particularly unusual, the twist here is that the skulls were painted and named so your dearly departed was quite identifiable.
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