Dippach, four villages among pear orchards and railway lines

The commune of Dippach explains its own name with a simple Celtic etymology, «Dipp», the river, and «Ach», water. By Charlemagne’s time the village already appears as «Ad-Deobace», in 786. Today 4,721 people live across four villages in the canton of Capellen, the same canton as Mamer, Dippach, Bettange-sur-Mess, Schouweiler and Sprinkange, among fields, woods and the railway.

A castle, a church and a vanished village

The Thirty Years’ War wiped Russange, Bettange’s neighbour, off the map, a village that had shared a parish with Reckange-sur-Mess. Sprinkange church, built around 1766, has a baroque altar, and Abbot Bertels of Echternach drew its predecessor three times in the 16th century, a sign of how much the village mattered. In 1753 René Louis de Geysen built the castle of Bettange, and his family’s arms, a golden griffin, are now the commune’s coat of arms.

The castle’s story carries on. In 1903 the De La Salle brothers bought it and built a big school next door for up to 200 boarders, and in 1940 the Germans requisitioned it as a military hospital. It later passed to the state, which set up workshops run by the APEMH, the same association that owns most of the Parc Merveilleux, to give work and housing to people with intellectual disabilities.

Pears, trains and a sea reptile

The railway’s arrival on 6 September 1900 ended the village’s isolation. Farmers from all around used Dippach station to fill whole wagons with pears, the Pontebieren, bound for the brandy distilleries. And during work on the line, a cutting at Schouweiler turned up an ichthyosaur that the commune dates to around 100 million years ago, now on display at the Natural History Museum in the capital. It’s my favourite fact about the whole commune.

From 1902 to 1906 a brickworks ran in Schouweiler, on the site of today’s inn at 104 route de Longwy, until it closed because the clay wasn’t good enough.

In the Second World War, the commune notes, Dippach and Bascharage were regarded as strongholds of the resistance in the south, and on 9 September 1944 American troops pushed as far as Schouweiler, the day before they took Luxembourg City.

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Things to do in Dippach

Walk and eat well. The circular walk starts by Dippach church, crosses the village and fields to the Dippecherbësch woods, loops through them and comes back from the west, with parking and the Bei der Kapell bus stop at the start. For a station-to-station walk, CFL has a route from Dippach-Reckange to Leudelange. And in Schouweiler there’s Guillou Campagne, with a Michelin star.

Dippach-Reckange and Schouweiler, the commune’s two stops on the Pétange railway, come with a quirk, as the first stands on Bettange-sur-Mess land and the second on Sprinkange’s. For a bed, I’d head to the capital.

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