Stará Hlína

A hamlet on the old Třeboň–Jindřichův Hradec road with two remarkable stone bridges — the 12-arch, 119-metre inundation bridge of 1799 by Josef Rosenauer, and the 1781 bridge over the Vítek pond.

Stará Hlína sits where the old Moravian road out of Třeboň had to cross the wet margins of the Rožmberk pond, and its bridges tell that story. Krčín’s pond drowned the road in the 1580s; wooden bridges served for two centuries until the Schwarzenbergs replaced them in stone: a five-arch bridge over the Vítek pond in 1781, and in 1799 the long inundation bridge over the Lužnice floodplain — twelve arches, 119 metres, designed by Josef Rosenauer, the engineer of the Schwarzenberg timber canal in the Šumava. It carried road traffic until 1988 and is now a protected technical monument that walkers and cyclists have to themselves.