Bad Ems sits in a narrow, wooded bend of the Lahn river, where the valley is so steep that the town seems poured into the gap. It has been a spa since the Middle Ages, and by the nineteenth century it was one of the most fashionable in Europe. Kings, tsars and composers came to take the thermal waters, and the town is filled with grand hotels, a colonnaded Kurhaus and a Russian Orthodox church built for the Tsarist visitors. Dostoevsky came to take the cure in the 1870s, and in 1870 an incident in the park gave the town a place in history books.
That year, King Wilhelm of Prussia met the French ambassador on the promenade, and the diplomatic exchange that followed was edited by Bismarck into a telegram known as the Ems Dispatch. The sharpened version inflamed French public opinion and pushed France into the war with Prussia that Bismarck wanted. A small memorial in the park recalls the moment. It is a remarkable thing that a few lines of editing in a spa town could do so much harm, and the town carries it lightly.
The Limes belongs to a much older story. The Roman frontier crossed the Lahn near here on its way from the Rhine into the Taunus, and the numbered watchtowers mark the line that ran through the woods on the heights above the valley. A funicular, the Kurwaldbahn, climbs from town to the forested ridge, and walkers can follow the frontier line from the top.
The riding in the Lahn valley is excellent. The river road is a pleasure at moderate speed, twisting under cliffs and between vineyards and old iron-ore workings, and the roads that climb onto the Taunus and Westerwald ridges are full of tight bends and long views. The valley is narrow, so traffic is slow behind lorries and the occasional tour bus. Fuel is available in Bad Ems itself, and Nassau and Lahnstein are close. Autumn, when mist hangs in the gorge and the beech turns amber, makes the best ride, and a coffee in the Kurpark afterwards is a civilised end to it.