Ahrensburg owes its character to a single building, the castle. Schloss Ahrensburg is a Renaissance moated residence of pale rose-pink stucco, built in the late sixteenth century by the Rantzau family, one of the great noble houses of Holstein, and it stands in a green park beside a mirror-like pond. The house has a fairytale shape, with gables, turrets and a drawbridge, and it is now a museum. Behind it stretch lawns and an avenue of ancient limes, and the town's coffee houses and bakeries cluster nearby.
The area has a far older claim to fame. About twelve thousand years ago, reindeer hunters roamed the tundra of what is now Stormarn, and the remains of their camps were found in the Ahrensburg tunnel valley, a long, glacial channel just north of the town. The culture is now known to archaeologists as the Ahrensburgian, named for the town, and it is one of the best-known late Ice Age hunter cultures in northern Europe. A walk through the wooded valley gives a hint of that wild past.
Ahrensburg is a town of thirty thousand, a prosperous commuter place on the northeastern edge of Hamburg, and it has the comforts you would expect: filling stations, supermarkets, good bakeries and a pleasant pedestrian zone. It is an easy place to take a break, because it is close to the city and has easy parking. Großhansdorf, three kilometres to the north-east, is a woodland suburb with a large nature reserve of beech forest, where the ground rises into low hills.
For the rider, the coffee stop is a gentle pause between the city and the lakes beyond. The roads east of Ahrensburg wind through woods and fields, with sandy lanes lined with oaks, and the traffic thins quickly once you pass the last roundabouts. In spring the beech woods are a fresh, bright green. Take your coffee in the castle park if the weather allows, and watch the ducks on the moat. It is a calm place to start the day.