Zehdenick is a small town on the Havel in the north of Brandenburg, and it is tied to a thing most people would not think about, bricks. In the nineteenth century, the clay pits around the town fed hundreds of brickworks that shipped their product by barge down the Havel to build Berlin, and much of the capital's tenement-blocks came from here. When the pits were abandoned they flooded, turning the district into a landscape of small lakes and channels. The Ziegeleipark at Mildenberg, a few kilometres south, preserves a ring kiln and machinery, and gives an honest picture of the industry.
The town itself has about fifteen thousand people across its wider area, with a Cistercian nunnery foundation from the thirteenth century that left a handful of buildings by the river. The Havel here is slow and winding, lined with reeds and willows, and boats in summer drift between locks. The land around is flat, forested and sparsely populated, a mix of pine, birch and wet meadows that merges northward into the Schorfheide and the lakes of the Uckermark. Cranes breed in the wet places, and in autumn they gather in numbers.
Riding in this region is quiet and unhurried. The roads are mostly straight and smooth, with avenues of old oak, lime and chestnut trees, and the bends come when the road meets a river or a lake. You may share the tarmac with farm vehicles and cyclists, and the surface turns rough on minor roads where the old concrete slabs of the GDR days peek through. Wildlife is common, with deer in the forest edges and boar in the fields at dusk. Summer weekends bring bathers to the lakes, and in winter, snow lingers under the trees.
Practically, Zehdenick has a couple of fuel stations, a supermarket, bakeries and a few restaurants by the water, and Gransee and Liebenwalde, a little further off, offer more of the same. The Dahme-Heideseen park, named in this stop's label, is a long way to the south-east, so treat this as a separate landscape. A stop at the Mildenberg brickworks museum, with its tall chimney, is a good way to spend an hour, and the cafe there serves cake and coffee. Carry some cash, because small places still prefer it.