Somewhere around five thousand years ago, farmers on this sandy ridge dragged enormous boulders together, laid capstones across them and made a tomb that is still standing. It lies on the edge of Borger, and it is the largest of the Dutch hunebedden: more than twenty metres long, built from stones that weigh tons each, set in a quiet clearing among oaks and pines. You can walk right up to it, run your hand along the granite and peer into the chamber where the dead of the Funnel Beaker culture were laid with their pots and axes.
The stones themselves did not come from here. They are glacial erratics, carried down from Scandinavia by the ice sheet that covered the north of the Netherlands during the penultimate ice age and dropped when it melted. The same ice shaped the Hondsrug, the long low ridge on which Borger sits, and the whole area is now a UNESCO geopark. Right beside the big tomb, the Hunebedcentrum explains all of this with real finds, reconstructed houses and an outdoor area, and it is genuinely worth an hour, even for someone who normally rides past museums.
Borger itself is a village of a few thousand people with a long main street, a church, a couple of supermarkets and some cafes and snack bars. It is the kind of place where you can park the bike on the pavement without fuss and order a coffee and an apple cake while the pensioners on e-bikes overtake each other outside. Fuel is usually to be found in or near the village; Stadskanaal, a bigger town about thirteen kilometres to the north-east, has everything if you need more than that.
The riding here is all about texture rather than drama. The Hondsrug roads run north to south along the ridge through a patchwork of forest, open heath, small maize fields and brick farmhouses with deep thatched roofs. There are no mountains, but the lanes curve gently around old field patterns, rise and fall a few metres over the ridge, and are lined by tall beeches that make a green tunnel in summer. Go slowly. The famous hunebedden are signposted all along the ridge, many within a few hundred metres of the road, and stopping at three or four of them in an afternoon is a good way to slow down. Watch for sand on the edges of the forest tracks after rain.