The Schiessentümpel Waterfall is a fall of a few metres on the Black Ernz stream in the Müllerthal, the Little Switzerland of Luxembourg, where the water splits into three arms around a single boulder under a sandstone bridge of 1879 railed with bare tree branches, and it is the emblem of the region, reached by a stair of mossy sandstone blocks down from the road on the Mullerthal Trail. The bridge is short enough to cross in ten paces, an arch built by one stonemason in four months, from 20 March to 27 July 1879, with ferns growing straight out of its mortar and a railing of rustic branches, and it stands with one foot in each of two communes, since the boundary between Waldbillig and Consdorf runs down the middle of the stream; the fall below it is small, but the three white strands over the dark rock, the moss and the arch together make the picture on every brochure of the country, and the pool at the foot is where the name comes from. The way down drops through ivy and beech until the traffic noise is gone, and the trail follows the stream through a gorge of sandstone.
The rock is what makes the region: the Luxembourg sandstone does not shed rain but swallows it, porous enough to hold water like a sponge and let it out slowly through springs, and it has weathered into cliffs, chimneys and crevices that the trail threads through, most famously the Kuelscheier east of the falls, a rock corridor tens of metres long, narrow and almost pitch black, walked with a torch or skirted by the marked detour. The beech woods above the gorge turn gold and copper from mid-October into early November, and the wet black sandstone under them makes the colour read twice as strong; the stream is rain-fed and runs fullest from December to March, when all three arms are heavy, and can thin to trickles by late summer. The Schiessentümpel is a small waterfall with a famous bridge, and the sandstone country around it is the walk.