Letter from Shengen Hugh O'ShaughnessyI finished my glass of fruity wine at the Café Schimmel in this little Luxembourgish village with its Bronze Age remains and its 14th-century castle and walked across the bridge over the River Moselle.
Ahead lay the German village of Perl near where the borders of Luxembourg, France and Germany meet. The river is high these days but that was not stopping an enormous Belgian barge with the captain's motor car parked behind the wheel-house slowly pushing its cargo of minerals upstream from the Netherlands through Germany into France.
The only way I knew that I had left the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg was a road sign in the middle announcing Germany - no barbed wire, no barrier, no officials with rubber stamps, not even a bump in the road.
Schengen is where the principle that people should have the same right to move as freely within the European Union as merchandise and money enjoy took on life. An agreement to this effect was signed here in the middle of the Moselle in June 1985 aboard a passenger vessel, the Princesse Marie-Astrid, at a point in the river where the three countries come together. As they prune their vines, which seem to cover every square metre of the steep hills hereabouts, Schengen's inhabitants take pride that their village's name has become famous in the EU and far beyond.
Nowhere better than Schengen for such a deal to be signed. In the café fluency in at least two languages is natural. A blackboard tells you in French and German there is steak - beef or the equine variety - for a few euros.
The local newspaper tells you the day's events in articles in either French or German - the mix of languages on a page apparently depends on the editor's whim. Luxembourgers speak both, as well as their own Luxembourgish, a tongue which has ingredients of both languages. The labourers at the bar are speaking Portuguese.
The fact that one needs neither passport nor visa to go from one EU country to another and that vessels of 1,500 tons ply deep into France from the North Sea are signs that frontiers and the bureaucracy that has surrounded them for a century or more are crumbling fast in the heart of Europe. And the process will quicken when new members join the Union in May and all 10 of them commit themselves to freeing up their frontiers.
For those who live in Ireland and Britain, whose governments are not signatories of the full agreement, and who therefore do not benefit from the freedoms agreed on that boat at Schengen, the experience of wandering round Schengenland without a passport is liberating - exhilarating even.
In Schengenland there is none of the gloom and suspicion - engendered by the overblown promotion of a supposed "War on Terror" - which bedevils frontiers elsewhere. No x-ray machines, no emptying of your pockets of coins and keys into a tray to prevent some scanner sounding the alarm about you, no perfect stranger feeling over your body or ordering you to take off your overcoat or your shoes, no worrying about whether you've got your passport with you and that it hasn't expired.
The attractions of free movement are so powerful that they have attracted states outside the EU: Iceland and Norway have both signed up to the Schengen agreement. In a few months, after the accession of the 10 new members, Schengenland will have expanded, allowing citizens and foreigners to roam at will without passports from Brittany to the Russian border and from Nicosia to Reykjavik.
Nowhere, it must be said, is the sense of freedom better savoured than on Europe's railways. There is no railway in Schengen, the villagers just cross the Moselle and take the German train. Once the traveller has reached a station in the continental EU, Europe is her or his oyster. The question of borders is reduced to such minimal importance that, aboard fast trains in the small states of Luxembourg and the Low Countries, it is often difficult to guess kingdom, republic or grand-duchy one is in at any given moment. The timetables (available at www.bahn.de or www.raileurope.co.uk) solemnly note the frontier stations, but seldom does an express waste its time stopping at one.
And the freedom to travel that the villagers of Schengen enjoy has equally meant that people from other EU states have been free to come in to settle beside them. The low-paid Portuguese in particular have had a love affair with the Grand Duchy and its wage rates, coming to work in its fields and factories in their thousands. One particular town, Larochette, found itself with a Portuguese majority and had to firmly turn down requests that the business in the town hall could be done in Portuguese.
Of the 1,559 inhabitants in the Schengen neighbourhood none is Irish, 12 are British but 202 are Portuguese and it is a fair bet that Schengen's vineyards would be in a much worse state without the help of those 202 southern Europeans. The village is a living example of the immense benefits freedom of movement can bring.
"We're very proud of our village," Henri, a local councillor, murmurs.