Lauterbrunnen Valley & Trummelbach Falls

The Lauterbrunnen valley is a trough gouged by a glacier, with walls that rise almost vertically for hundreds of metres on both sides. Seventy-two waterfalls come off those walls. The name means loud springs. The Staubbach is the one everyone photographs: 297 metres in a single drop, so tall that the water breaks into mist before it lands. Goethe stood beneath it in 1779 and wrote a poem about it the same evening. The Trummelbach is the one worth travelling for. It carries the meltwater of the Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau - twenty thousand litres a second at peak melt, and something like twenty thousand tonnes of rock and grit a year - and it does it inside the mountain. Ten cascades have cut a corkscrew shaft through the limestone, and a tunnel lift and a series of galleries let you stand next to them. It is loud, wet and cold, and it is the only glacier waterfall in Europe you can go inside. Tolkien walked this valley in 1911 and drew on it for Rivendell. Short, easy and low-altitude, this is the product that works on days when the peaks are closed in.