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Although the trail itself is in Belgium, they're actually much closer to German cities and services. "If they have an accident, I tell them they should roll to the German side," she said, "because the ambulance will come faster."

This tiny spot of Germany is entirely surrounded by Switzerland, which makes it both an enclave and exclave, geographic oddities to trivia fans, but confounding to everyone else.

In Roman times, the island was known as "Pausoa", the Basque word for passage or step. Then the French translated this as "Paysans", meaning peasant, before transposing it as "Faisans", for pheasant. Over time, the name Île des Faisans stuck.

The humble island finally came into prominence in 1648, following a ceasefire at the end of the Thirty Years' War between France and Spain, when it was chosen as a neutral space to demarcate the new borderlands. In fact, 24 summits took place, with military escorts on standby should talks breakdown. Eleven years later, the Treaty of the Pyrenees peace accord was struck.

To honour the occasion, a royal wedding was mooted, and, in 1660, French King Louis XIV married the daughter of King Philip IV, Maria Theresa of Spain, on the spot of the declaration. Wooden bridges were built to ease passage, royal parties arrived in state barges and carriages, and tapestries and paintings were commissioned. Diego Velázquez, court painter to Philip and whose magnum opus remains Las Meninas (a portrait of Margaret Theresa with her maids of honour) was put in charge of arranging much of the festivities.

So symbolic was Pheasant Island as a metaphor of peace, in fact, that it was decided both countries would have joint custody of the territory. Spain would hold stewardship from 1 February to 31 July each year, while Pheasant Island would become an official part of France for the other six months. In that moment, the world's smallest condominium was born.

By definition, condominiums are places determined by the presence of at least more than one sovereign state. The sense is derived from Latin, with "com" implying "together" and "dominium" meaning "right of ownership". And over the centuries, numerous countries have become embroiled in geographic tug o' wars over condominiums, with governments spending decades happily arguing the finer points of who owns what and why. Most aren't centres of empire, but rather experimental, geopolitical addendums.

At least for now, there are eight in the world, including Lake Constance, the tridominium between Austria, Germany and Switzerland; the Brčko District shared by Bosnia and Herzegovina; and the disputed territory of the Republika Srpska. Then there is the Joint Regime Area, a shared maritime zone between Colombia and Jamaica; and the Abyei Area contested by South Sudan and Sudan.

Another is the Moselle river and its tributaries the Sauer and the Our – a riverine condominium shared between Germany and Luxembourg; while the Gulf of Fonseca is a tripartite condominium portioned up by Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Antarctica is the last but also the largest and most momentous, a theoretical continental condominium, governed by the 29 signatories of the Antarctic Treaty that have consulting status.

On the day of my visit to Pheasant Island, the territory was in the hands of the Spanish. A group of kayakers was exploring its nooks from the water, and, on land, only one passer-by stopped to take photographs. Besides administering the gardening, maintaining the boat landing site, discussing fishing rights and monitoring the water quality, there isn't much for the Spanish to do on a month-to-month basis. Visitors are only allowed onto the island on rare occasions: either on one of the bi-annual handover days, when the island is abuzz with activity during the official ceremony, with flags, delegates, diplomats and plenty of formal pomp; or as part of ad-hoc, occasional heritage tours.

This striking change is familiar yet also baffling. Only the skin on our fingers and toes wrinkle when immersed in water, while other body parts such as our forearms, torso, legs and face remain no more crinkled than before they were submerged.

This water-induced wrinkling of skin on our fingertips and toes has occupied the thoughts and work of scientists for decades. Most have puzzled over what causes this puckering in the first place, but more recently the question of why, and what purpose it may serve, has attracted the attention of researchers. Perhaps more intriguing still, however, is what our shriveled fingers can reveal about our own health.

It takes around 3.5 minutes in warm water – 40C (104F) is considered the optimal temperature – for your fingertips to begin wrinkling, while in cooler temperatures of about 20C (68F) it can take up to 10 minutes. Most studies have found it takes around 30 minutes of soaking time to reach maximum wrinklage, however.

Fingertip wrinkling was commonly thought to be a passive response where the upper layers of the skin swelled as water flooded into the cells via a process known as osmosis – where water molecules move across a membrane to equalise the concentration of the solutions on either side. But as long ago as 1935, scientists have suspected there is more to the process than this.

Doctors studying patients with injuries that had severed the median nerve – one of the main nerves that run down the arm to the hand – found that their fingers did not wrinkle. Among its many roles, the median nerve helps to control so-called sympathetic activities such as sweating and the constriction of blood vessels. Their discovery suggested that the water-induced wrinkling of fingertips was in fact controlled by the nervous system.

Later studies by doctors in the 1970s provided further evidence of this, and they proposed using the immersion of the hands in water as a simple bedside test to assess nerve damage that might affect the regulation of unconscious processes such as blood flow.

Then in 2003, neurologists Einar Wilder-Smith and Adeline Chow, who were working at the National University Hospital in Singapore at the time, took measurements of blood circulation in the hands of volunteers as they soaked them in water. They found that as the skin on the volunteers' fingertips began to wrinkle, there was a significant drop in blood flow in the fingers. //

With the help of 500 volunteers who visited the Science Museum in London during 2020, Davis measured how much force they needed to use to grip a plastic object. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those with dry, unwrinkled hands needed to use less force than people whose hands were wet – so their grip on the object was better. But when they submerged their hands in a water bath for a few minutes to turn their hands wrinkly, the grip force fell between the two even though their hands were still wet.

"The results were amazingly clear," says Davis. "The wrinkling increased the amount of friction between the fingers and the object. What is particularly interesting is that our fingers are sensitive to this change in the surface friction and we use this information to apply less force to grip an object securely." //

Unsymmetrical wrinkling of the fingers – where one hand wrinkles less than the other despite the same immersion time – has even been suggested as an early sign of Parkinson's disease as it indicates the sympathetic nervous system is not functioning correctly on one side of the body.

So, while the question of why our fingers and toes began wrinkling in water in the first place remains open, our pruney digits are proving useful to doctors in other surprising ways.

The now-renowned Schengen Agreement was signed in a tiny village in Luxembourg’s south-east, a location that was drenched in symbolism. //

Just as I thought I was running out of country, I arrived at tiny Schengen, tucked in among the vines on the western bank of the Moselle. With fewer than 520 residents, it’s certainly not the big-name, bright-lights destination one might expect for an agreement that would change the way people travelled in Europe. Nevertheless, it was here, on a murky morning on 14 June 1985, that representatives of Belgium, France, Luxembourg, West Germany (as was) and the Netherlands gathered to officially seal the deal on this revolutionary new border-free zone. //

As Luxembourg was soon to take over the EEC presidency, the small nation was entitled to choose where the signing of this treaty would take place. It just so happens that Schengen is the only place where France and Germany both join with a Benelux member, securing it as the destination of choice.

As the meeting place of three countries, the choosing of Schengen was drenched in symbolism. To ensure it was a neutral affair, the signatories were assembled on a pleasure cruiser, the MS Princesse Marie-Astrid, to put pen to paper. The cruiser was moored as close as possible to the tri-point border, which runs down the middle of the Moselle River. //

Today, the Schengen Area comprises 26 member states. Of these, 22 are members of the EU, while four (Iceland, Switzerland, Norway and Liechtenstein) are not. //

...the European Museum. Here, the story of how the Schengen Area came to exist is expertly told through interactive displays inside and a variety of monuments outside.

Don’t miss the cabinet of official border control caps from the member states at the time they joined the area, each a piece of national identity that was surrendered in order to make Schengen work. Poignant sections of the Berlin Wall sit perfectly placed in front of the museum, set there to remind us all that walls – in this case, world-famous reinforced concrete from one of its founding members, no less – don’t have to remain in place forever.