Quedlinburg is a town that survived by being overlooked. It escaped the worst of the wars and the building booms, and so it has more than thirteen hundred half-timbered houses, from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, packed into a tangle of cobbled lanes at the foot of the Harz mountains. UNESCO listed the town in 1994, and walking through it, you feel as though you have fallen into a picture book of a German town, with leaning facades, carved beams and window boxes.
The church of Saint Wiperti sits a short way from the castle hill, and its crypt is one of the oldest in Germany. It dates from the tenth century, and the story of the place goes back to the time of the Ottonian kings, the dynasty that founded the Holy Roman Empire. Henry the Fowler, the first of them, died in 936 and was buried on the castle hill above, and his widow Mathilde founded a community of canonesses there that became one of the richest and most powerful convents in the realm. Wiperti is simpler, a place of stone and quiet, with a low crypt where the vault rests on short columns. Step inside, and the air is cold and the sound muffled, and you can well believe it has been a place of prayer for a thousand years.
The road from here leads east toward Naumburg, with its great cathedral and its famous statues of the founders. The Harz foothills around Quedlinburg are easy riding, with gentle bends, tree-lined avenues and fields of wheat and rapeseed. Nearby, a spectacular rock ridge called the Teufelsmauer, the Devil's Wall, runs for kilometres across the landscape in a line of jagged sandstone, with a path along the top. Further south, the Harz proper has tighter roads and forest, with the Brocken rising above, and the narrow-gauge steam railway puffs around its flanks.
Quedlinburg has nearly twenty-three thousand people, with fuel on the edges and plenty of cafés and restaurants in the centre. Try a Harz specialty such as a hearty sausage dish or a slice of the local cake, and the town is also known for seeds and flower breeding, with big seed companies in the area. Cobbles in the old town are rough, so park outside and walk. Advent markets are popular, and the town is packed at weekends in December, so choose a weekday in spring or autumn for the best light.