Five thousand years ago, someone in the marshes south of Ljubljana made a wheel, and it is still here to prove it. In 2002, archaeologists working in the peat at Stare gmajne found a wooden wheel with its axle, made of ash and oak, which turned out to be about five thousand one hundred years old, the oldest known wheel of its kind in the world. It is now in the City Museum in Ljubljana, but it was found in the Ljubljana Marshes, the Barje, a broad, flat, wet plain between the city and the hills, which was once a lake. In the Neolithic and Copper Age, people built villages on stilts above the water, and the wood, preserved in the waterlogged peat, has survived for millennia. The pile dwellings of the Barje were included in the UNESCO listing of Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps, in 2011.
The label points to the Church of St Michael, which stands in the marshes on a slight rise, one of the small village churches that dot the Barje. In autumn, mist lies on the fields, and the whole plain turns silver.
The Barje is a nature park, a place of drainage ditches, meadows, reeds and birds, with corncrakes, lapwings and storks in spring and summer. The Ljubljanica river, which winds through it, was drained and channelled in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the water still returns in wet years.
For riders, the plain is easy and flat, with quiet country roads and cycle tracks, and in a few kilometres the hills begin, with winding roads toward Krim and the Iska gorge. Ljubljana, only four kilometres away, is a delightful capital of around 270,000 people with plenty of fuel, repair shops and cafes, and a car-free old town with Plecnik's bridges and the dragon on the Dragon Bridge.
The best seasons are spring and autumn. Summers are warm, with thunderstorms. Winters bring fog and frost. Try a plate of Carniolan sausage, Kranjska klobasa, with mustard and fresh bread, in a local inn.