Eutin had its literary moment long before it had a reputation for roses. In the late eighteenth century the little residence town of the prince-bishops of Lübeck became a quiet meeting place for poets and painters, and people spoke of it as the Weimar of the north. Johann Heinrich Voss, who gave Germany its beloved translation of Homer's Odyssey, taught at the Latin school here, and the painter Wilhelm Tischbein, famous for his portrait of Goethe in the Roman countryside, spent his last years in the town and died here in 1829.
The roads that lead out from the castle quarter do so with an easy, rolling grace. They run east through a landscape the glaciers shaped, a quilt of lakes, low ridges, beech woods and rape fields, and then drift towards the old Hanseatic city of Lübeck and the long, thin lakes of the Lauenburg country. The surfaces are mostly good, the junctions are sparse, and the bends are the kind that let you lean without a worry. In May the fields are a shock of yellow, and in October the beech woods burn copper, so the ride rewards the calendar twice.
The goal of this stretch is the edge of the Schaalsee, a clear, deep lake on the old border with East Germany that is now part of a biosphere reserve. For forty years the line of the inner-German frontier ran through the water, which meant the shores stayed undisturbed, and today they are rich with cranes, sea eagles and rare orchids. That strange gift of history makes this one of the quietest landscapes in northern Germany.
Eutin itself is a town of seventeen thousand and offers all the practical comforts: stations on the edges, supermarkets, bakeries, and a pleasant market square where you can sit and watch the town go about its morning. Malente, five kilometres away, is the neighbouring spa town on the next lake. Start with a full tank and a decent breakfast, because once you leave the lakeland and drop into the farming country further east the services thin out, and the cafés will not open until ten.