01
Stop one
Zytturm
Wilson Terry Cuff Wristband: My entire job is absorbing what would otherwise reach your hand, so hear me — this tower did not begin at fifty-two metres. It was a gate tower of the medieval town, raised and embellished across centuries until it became the emblem of Zug. Are you willing to be built in stages? Its roof carries the cantonal blue and white, and beneath the great clock an astronomical dial tracks weekday, month, moon phase and leap year. It guarded the landward entrance of a lakeside town that joined the Swiss Confederation in 1352, and it stood through the medieval fires and through 1435, the year part of the lakeshore street sank into the water. It took the blow and stayed. Climb the stairs. The old roofs, the lake and the Rigi are up there waiting for you.
02
Stop two
Zug Castle
Wilson Terry Cuff Wristband: Ask yourself who used to own you. This castle was the seat of the Habsburg bailiffs who governed Zug in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Then 1352 — the town entered the Swiss Confederation, threw off Austrian lordship for good, and the castle passed into its own hands. Same walls. New management. It served for centuries as residence and administration, half-timbered upper works added above the old stone base, restored in the twentieth century, and it now holds the Museum Burg Zug: archaeological finds, medieval sculpture, goldsmiths' work, patrician interiors. The building that once watched over you can end up telling your story.
In my trade you learn that the small things carry the whole experience. Nobody praises the glass; everybody notices when it is wrong. This is a cotton terry cuff wristband — looped terry pile, which is the only fabric that actually lifts sweat off skin rather than smearing it, with a stretch cuff that sits snug without cutting in.
It goes on the forearm, it keeps sweat off the grip, and it wipes your forehead between points. That is the entire product, and it does not need one more sentence of technology. It washes in a machine and rotates through a match-day bag without ceremony.
You will wear it everywhere from a July afternoon on an outdoor court to an indoor hall in February, and it is also perfect for an hour on the Landsgemeindeplatz with a coffee, where the only thing on your wrist has one job and quietly does it.
What it does need is an afternoon in Zug. The Zytturm, the time tower, is the town's emblem — a medieval gate tower raised and embellished over the centuries to about fifty-two metres, its steep tiled roof painted in the blue and white of the canton. Set your watch by it; I do, twice a day, badly.
Zug Castle was the seat of the Habsburg bailiffs who governed the town in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, until Zug joined the Swiss Confederation in 1352 and threw off Austrian lordship for good.
St Oswald's, begun in 1478 under the master builder Hans Felder, is one of the most important late-Gothic churches in central Switzerland, dedicated to an Anglo-Saxon royal saint whose cult somehow reached the Alps.
And the Landsgemeindeplatz, the square by the little harbour where the open-air citizens' assembly once met, opens the old town onto the lake — the town was built to the water's edge on unstable ground, and the lake has taken part of it back more than once. Then have the Kirschtorte. That part is not optional.
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