Lorsch looks like a regular small town of the Hessian Bergstrasse, and then you see the Torhalle, a little gatehouse of red and white stone with an arcade at the bottom and a pitched roof above, which is one of the very few surviving buildings of the Carolingian age in Germany. The abbey was founded in 764, rose to enormous wealth and influence under Charlemagne's family, and its library produced and preserved a startling number of manuscripts. The Lorsch Pharmacopoeia, written around 795, is one of the earliest known medical texts from German lands, and the monks' collection of books is scattered through libraries in Rome, Heidelberg and the Vatican today. UNESCO listed the abbey and nearby Altenmünster in 1991.
Altenmünster is the older monastery site, a short distance away, and little remains there beyond a modest ruin and an outline in the ground, but the sense of continuity is strong. The monks chose this flat land at the edge of the Rhine plain, near the foot of the Odenwald, and the abbey became a powerful landowner whose records show the landscape being shaped, tilled and drained around it. In the sixteenth century the abbey was dissolved and lost its role, and the buildings were damaged over time, including in a fire in the Thirty Years' War.
The ride in is easy, mostly flat farm roads and town streets from Heppenheim, Einhausen or from the A5 motorway, which runs to the west. Lorsch is a town of about thirteen thousand, so fuel, bakeries, cafes and a pharmacy within walking distance are all there. The better riding lies east, where the Odenwald rises and the road to Fürth and Lindenfels winds through beech forest with tidy bends and fewer trucks. Cycle traffic is heavy on weekends, and the Bergstrasse is famous for almonds, early blossom in March, and good wine on the slopes above.
The abbey grounds are open and green, with a museum and a long wall of old sandstone. Give it an hour. A museum entry fee is small, and it is a quiet half day that suits an afternoon between more demanding roads. If it rains, you are close to the gatehouse door in any case, and the red and white pattern of the stone looks best then, when it is wet and the light is flat.