Echzell is a village of a few thousand people in the Wetterau, the broad, fertile basin north-east of Frankfurt, where loess soil has been farmed since the Stone Age and the horizon rarely rises above a gentle swell. The Romans liked it for exactly that reason. They built a fort at Echzell in the later first century as part of their push into the Wetterau, and a civil settlement grew up around it in the usual way, with traders, craftsmen and families outside the gates. The fort later became part of the Upper German-Raetian Limes, which UNESCO listed in 2005. Almost nothing of the walls stands now, and the outline lies mostly under fields and houses, so the Echzell stop is about reading a landscape rather than visiting a monument.
That is not a bad thing for a rider. The Wetterau is easy country, with straight lanes between wheat and sugar beet, wind that you can feel in the open stretches, and a succession of small towns with half-timbered cores. The Horloff river meanders in the lowlands nearby, and in spring the meadows flood and bring in herons and, in some years, cranes on migration. The surface of the farm roads varies, with tractor mud on the verges in harvest time, and the best riding is in the morning when the air is cold and the light is long and low.
For practical needs you have what you want. Echzell has around six thousand people, so fuel, a bakery and a pharmacy are within reach, and Reichelsheim and Berstadt are close. Further south the ground climbs towards the Vogelsberg, a huge old volcano that is the largest basalt field in central Europe, which gives you a clean change of scenery if you want real corners. A few kilometres along, the Limes line itself runs on towards Butzbach and the Taunus.
Keep the stop short and honest. Read the board, stand on the field edge for a moment, and notice how flat the horizon looks to a soldier posted here from Italy or Gaul. Then go and find a village bakery, which in the Wetterau often sells excellent plum cake in late summer.