River Lech

The Lech has not always run where it does now. Early in the Ice Age it swung north east towards the Danube at a sharp angle, much as the Isar and Inn still do further east, and the Iller once cut across what is today the Lech's course below Augsburg. After the Lech found a straighter way north near Schongau, the Danube itself ran differently for a long stretch, turning north from the Lech's mouth through the Wellheim dry valley and down the line of today's lower Altmühl, until a breakthrough near Stepperg, towards the end of the Riss glaciation, gave it the southern course it follows now. Inscriptions from 8 and 7 BC record a Celtic people called the Licates, and in the second century Ptolemy wrote of a river called Likios. By then the valley belonged to the Roman province of Raetia, and the road that mattered was the Via Claudia Augusta, which ran from Augusta Vindelicum, today's Augsburg, towards Rome. Around 570 the poet Venantius Fortunatus wrote the name as Licca, and by the eighth century people were saying Lech. As Roman rule faded, the river became a frontier between the Alemannic tribes to the west and the Bavarians to the east, and that old line still shows in dialect and in village names, with ing on one side and ingen on the other. On 10 August 955 the river lent its name to one of the best known battles of medieval Europe, when King Otto I and Bishop Ulrich of Augsburg defeated the Hungarian horsemen on the Lechfeld and brought the raids across Central Europe to an end. Later the Wittelsbach dukes of Bavaria governed the western edge of their lands from border towns such as Landsberg and Friedberg, which collected generous ducal privileges and a good deal of prosperity. Friedberg also kept getting caught in quarrels with wealthy Augsburg, a free imperial city on the other bank of the argument. The sharpest dispute was about water. Augsburg's right to divert the Lech at the Hochablass was contested for centuries, and between 1457 and 1596 the argument grew into what people called a water war. In April 1632, during the Thirty Years War, a Swedish army under King Gustav II Adolf reached the Lech near Rain, with Ingolstadt next on its list. Count Tilly tried to hold the crossing with a smaller Bavarian force. After two days of cannon fire across the water the Swedes found a place to cross a little further south, Tilly was fatally wounded in the fighting, and the Bavarians withdrew to Ingolstadt, which Gustav Adolf nevertheless never managed to take. For most of its history the Lech was a working river. Gold was washed from its gravel, though never in amounts that mattered, and timber from the Alps was floated down in great quantities. Rafts carried goods as well as logs, and by the middle of the nineteenth century several thousand of them left the main harbours each year, among them Reutte, Füssen, Landsberg and Augsburg. Early weirs, including the Hochablass, were built with special gaps so that rafts could still get through. In Augsburg the diverted water turned mill wheels and later helped the textile industry take off. Upstream, a stepped weir begun in 1784 created the Lechfall at Füssen, and in 1910 a flood badly damaged the Hochablass itself, which had to be blown up to prevent worse damage downstream. The twentieth century turned the river into a staircase. The canal power station at Gersthofen opened in 1901, the first weir across the main river followed around 1914, and the construction of the Forggensee in the 1950s produced Germany's largest reservoir by surface area. Today the German stretch carries around 30 power stations and 24 reservoirs. The price was paid in gravel and fish. With floods held back and weirs blocking the way upstream, gravel banks silted up, floodplain forests were cut off from the water, and fish that depend on gravel for spawning declined sharply. Below Augsburg the river was also heavily polluted until the 1970s, because sewage ran untreated into the canal system, and only a modern treatment works that removes 99 per cent of the load brought it back to a reasonable quality. Much of the more recent story is about giving something back. In Tyrol, citizens' groups helped stop several power station projects, and the valley was designated a nature park at the end of 2004, although a national park never came to pass. Dams have been partly dismantled so that gravel can move again, the Lebensraum Lechtal project has worked since 1998 to link habitats along the river, and the Lechweg and Lechradweg have made the whole length walkable and rideable. The Lech today is both a hydroelectric workhorse and one of the last Alpine rivers that still behaves like a wild one in places.