Arnsburg confuses people, and for good reason. The name belongs first to a Cistercian monastery in the Wetter valley near Lich, whose roofless Gothic church stands in a meadow as one of the most romantic ruins in Hesse. But on the wooded hill nearby lies an older layer: a Roman fort on the Limes, sometimes called the Alteburg, with its civil settlement, and the frontier itself running past on its way around the northern edge of the Wetterau.
The fort was part of the line that guarded the fertile Wetterau basin, and like many forts here it had a settlement of traders, craftspeople and families clustered outside its gates. Nothing stands above ground; you look at banks, hollows and information boards among the trees. The monks came a thousand years later and chose the valley bottom for its water. They built the abbey in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and ran it until secularisation in the early nineteenth century. Part of the old monastery is still in use, and there is a café and inn in the grounds, which makes this one of the few Limes stops with a proper place to sit and eat.
The area offers two moods of riding. To the south and west lies the open Wetterau, wide fields and long views with straight roads that tempt more speed than the villages allow. To the north-east the land climbs towards the Vogelsberg, an old volcano with some lovely winding routes through forest and pasture, and plenty of local riders on summer evenings. Münzenberg, just to the south, is crowned by a twin-towered castle ruin that locals call the inkpot of the Wetterau, visible for miles and a great landmark to navigate by.
Lich, four kilometres away, is a town of thirteen thousand with fuel and shops, and its name will be familiar to beer drinkers because the Licher brewery has been here a long time. The old town has fine half-timbered houses and a collegiate church. Münzenberg is smaller but has the basics. Come in late spring when the meadows around the abbey ruin are full of flowers, or in autumn when the Gothic arches frame yellow trees against a grey sky. Either way, give the ruin twenty minutes; it repays them.