Loreley
— — the slate cliff the song wrapped itself around.
Not only on a wall.
“A slate cliff above a hard bend in the Rhine, where the river narrows and the current pulls. Boatmen have been losing their concentration here for as long as anyone has written it down. Heinrich Heine gave the rock its song in 1824 and the song stayed. The cliff faces south, catches the late light, and on a clear evening the slate reads warm bronze above water the colour of a wine bottle. From the studio.
Loreley, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Loreley is a slate rock that rises about 132 metres above the right bank of the Rhine near the town of Sankt Goarshausen in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. The cliff stands at the narrowest, deepest stretch of the river between Switzerland and the North Sea — a hard double bend that drops to roughly 25 metres and runs fast enough to have given river pilots trouble for centuries. The rock sits inside the Upper Middle Rhine Valley, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2002 for its 65-kilometre run of castles, vineyards, and river towns.
The cliff is Devonian slate, the same dark grey-brown stone that builds the vineyard terraces and the castle walls up and down this stretch of the Rhine. Quarrying upriver in the nineteenth century cleared the worst of the rapids, but the bend still demands attention; the river is signalled here with a white-and-red light system that lets only one direction of barge traffic through at a time. Above the rock, the plateau holds a small visitor centre and a sculpture of the legendary maiden by Russian artist Natasha Alexandrova Prinzessin Jusupov, installed in 1983.
The legend is comparatively young. Clemens Brentano invented the figure of Lore Lay in his 1801 ballad; Heinrich Heine fixed her in the public mind with Die Lorelei in 1824, set to music by Friedrich Silcher in 1837. The song has been sung up and down the river for nearly two centuries and is one of the most quoted German poems in the world. The plateau and the riverside path are open year-round; the best viewing is in late afternoon when the south-facing slate catches a low sun across the water.