Hall and The Dollar

Monday, 28 January 2002. We leave Schwaz and the silver mine and the coach takes us on to a place call Hall - pronounced "hal".

Hall is where the silver from the mine was minted into coins. The mint is within the castle of Hasegg. The taler münze (taler coin) of 1486 was, so they claim here, the first dollar of the world.

There were two ways of pressing coins demonstrated and you could have a go at both afterwards, so I did. The earliest form was where a blank disck of metal was placed on a small pedestal which had the design for one face etched into it. The blank was then covered by a cup type cap, which had the design for the upper face etched at the bottom of the cup. When the cup was inverted and placed over the blank, it brought the design down over the coin and the sides of the cup helped to keep the coin from slipping sideways. You then gave the cup an almighty whack with a hammer and the design of the coin was left imprinted on the blank.

The other method was a screw press. A similar way in that it impacted a blank disk, pressing it between two moulds into a coin, but with more certainty of a consistent strike. Obviously a timid strike with a hammer would leave only a slight impression. The screw was easier to give a hefty whirl and then the weight of the press itself took over. It is the coin made by this method that is shown above.

We now had a couple of hours free to look round the town.

Lots of alleyways in what was obviously the old part of town. We could see that there were more modern buildings off to our side, but we stayed within the old part which had more character.

There were a few features that stood out and asked to be photographed! There was little snow here. It varied greatly from place to place that we visited, but we had no way of knowing how high we were in the towns relative to the last or next town.

This is typical Hall - two nuns walk down an otherwise deserted steeply sloping street. I couldn't blame the locals for staying off the streets as it was bitterly cold. We were well layered up but even so...

On the way back to Mariastein we stopped at a huge souvenir shop called Souvenir Linda. We bought some place mats for the table. One wall was full of cuckoo clocks. They were all set at different times so that there was a regular interruption of calling birds and chimes rather than them all going off at the same time.

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