Dwight Peck's personal website

Marlowe's visit to Switzerland,
June-July 2007

Newly graduated from university, soon to be off to job-hunting, Marlowe visits the Old Dad in Switzerland.

Castles of Switzerland: Gruyères, 2007

You may not find this terribly rewarding unless you're included here, so this is a good time for casual and random browsers to turn back before they get too caught up in the sweep and majesty of the proceedings and can't let go.

We're trudging up to the side gate -- it's tourist high season, and we're hoping to slip in unnoticed.

The Belluard Barbican, the sneaky way into town from the northern side, halfway along the highstreet.

The Gruyères High Street, late June 2007

Croque Monsieur -- lovely melted cheese sandwich. I've ordered one on my last three visits to Gruyères, and each one took more than 15 minutes to toast it up. (I could do better just breathing on it. ) Thus, my advice: just settle for the pre-packaged cheese or meringues, or a Tastee-Freeze "ice cream" cone outside.

The High Street, looking past the chapel towards the château. Actually restaurants on both sides of the street specialize in tasty, overpriced tourist horrors, like strawberries in Gruyère double-cream, meringues in double-cream, all-Gruyère cheese fondue, and a discount on emergency cardiac care. A croque monsieur is about as brave as I'm willing to be in the afternoon.

When genuine Gruyère double-cream on a meringue and a fondue just won't do!

Behind the chapel, the Château St Germain, continuing on the left up to main castle. The H. R. Giger museum is housed in that main block -- I've been walking by it for years, and finally, in 2007, we went in and found it 1) fairly expensive, and 2) filled with some pretty repetitive, nasty art on the general theme of Penetration from the special effects guy on the "Alien" movies. Some details below.

The narrator (left), posing with one of Hanneke Beaumont's fantastic bronze fellows, displayed all around and within the Castle in the summer of 2007.

The Esplanade at the Château de Gruyères. The Dent de Broc (1829m) and Dent du Chamois (1830m) loom 3 or 4 kilometres to the east. Some of Hanneke's guys are chatting at the picnic table.

The view from the Esplanade down to Epagny just below, Broc (seat of the Caillier chocolate works) in the top right, and the recently human-made Lac de la Gruyère (1948) in the distance.

A lovely animated little'un, jumping along and explaining to her Mum all the neat things she'd seen in the castle gardens.

There's the castle, we've paid our fee, now we'll go see what's on offer for this season (the entrance fee is reasonably small, but as an Ami du Château de Gruyères we're a freebie anyway). The Castle of Gruyères is famous for its exhibitions of new, and mostly surrealistic-ish art, so we tremble with anticipation.

It's Hanneke Beaumont (1947- ) this time -- wonderful bronze sculptures of guys, all of them either talking or listening, and all of them leaning and peering.

Right here in the courtyard, Hanneke's boys are either listening to a lecture or lecturing it.

A kitchen (not Hanneke's)

The remains of Old Soldiers, with the old soldiers gone. Modern soldiers, with their night-vision cameras on their helmets and kevlar flak jackets, will also look gone in museum displays of the future, leaving behind only their kevlar.

A Gruyères interior

And another. The castle was bought by the Bovy and Balland families in the 19th century, and some of the best painters in the region, including Corot, got to dab away at the walls of these family rooms in the main block. (I won't name the others, because though they're famous I'd never heard of them. But, for flowers, maidens, and birdies, they are hot!)

More funky Bovy-Balland decorating in the family living rooms

The Hall of Preposterous Heroic Art

The Judgment Seat -- Hanneke's vision of the Law (just my guess)

The courtyard from somewhere up along the ramparts

The Drapeau Suisse fluttering

Fantasy art, a fine Gruyères tradition, ranged up and down the walls of one of the towers. Extremely interesting paintings by Patrick Woodroffe,

The courtyard from the inner ramparts

Hanneke's bronze boys, waiting for something

In the gardens, another one of Hanneke's Chaps, some tourists, and the village of Estavannens in the distance

The Dents du Broc and du Chamois, and the gardens of Gruyères Castle

The cute little tourist train passing out past the H. R. Giger Museum. H. R. Giger was a superb draftsman with a very strange sense of beauty who designed the special effects for the Hollywood movies about Alien and Poltergeist, and who, in a flush of misplaced enthusiasm, bought up this old building in the heart of Gruyères and made a museum about himself. The art of H. R.Giger is well-drawn, well-colored, worshipped by teenaged males, and surrealistically penetrative and sometimes disturbing and, at the end of the day, absolute rubbish in my view. If your teenagers insist upon paying the outrageous entrance fee, pay it for them, wait for them outside, and, when they emerge again, explain to them that not all art needs to be so repugnant, titillating, violent, and irrelevant, but they won't believe you.

The Drapeau Suisse

The Château St Germain, left centre, and the Château de Gruyères, centre right.

The château from the far (south) end of town, with some "victory gardens" ranged along the eastern hillside below the village.

The Super Petit-Train of Gruyères

A last look at Gruyères for 2007.

Feedback and suggestions are welcome if positive, resented if negative, . All rights reserved, all wrongs avenged. Posted 29 August 2007, revised 29 September 2014.

Photo credit: Jacques Kuenlin.

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