The Munot bell
Fly to Schaffhausen
Rung by hand every evening at nine o'clock, from the top of the tower that watches over Schaffhausen.
Above the rooftops of Schaffhausen and the Rhine stands the Munot, an enormous round stone tower. Work on it ran from 1564 to 1589, and its purpose was to defend the city. At the very top hangs a small bell: every evening, at nine o’clock sharp, someone rings it by hand.
That someone lives right there. The Munot has a keeper, today a woman, who lives in a flat fitted out inside the tower. In the past, her bell announced the hour for closing the city gates, then the hour when the inns and shops had to shut. The gates have gone, but the bell has not changed its hour. The keeper also looks after a small herd of fallow deer, which lives below in the old moat.
The tower itself is a curiosity. During the quarter of a century it took to build, artillery advanced so much that people doubted its usefulness the moment it was finished: a massive round fortress, just when the engineers of the day were already inventing low, star-shaped ramparts. That lag makes it precious today, almost as it was left at the end of the 1580s. Steps lead up to it from the old quarter; at the top, the platform opens onto the rooftops and the river.
Sources: Wikipedia, “Munot” (French, German and English).
Finding the chest
Its chest appears near Schaffhausen once you have discovered all its sites on the map.
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Every site of Schaffhausen is discovered: the chest is waiting for you near the town.
