In the middle of the nineteenth century, a pastor named Ludwig Harms founded a missionary seminary in Hermannsburg, a small village in the Lüneburg Heath, and sent farmers and craftsmen as missionaries to Africa and beyond. Their influence spread far further than anyone could have expected: there is a Hermannsburg in South Africa, and another in the Australian outback, founded by Lutheran missionaries from here. The mission still exists, and the village has kept a quiet, slightly pious charm, with half-timbered farmhouses and old oak trees.
The landscape around Hermannsburg is the classic Lüneburg Heath: sandy soils, pine forests, juniper bushes, birch trees and, in late summer, vast purple carpets of flowering heather. The heath is not a natural wilderness but a cultural landscape, created over centuries by grazing sheep, especially the local breed known as Heidschnucken, and it is maintained the same way today. The Örtze, a clear, fast-flowing little river, runs through the village, and it is popular with canoeists.
There is also darker history close by. A few kilometres west, near Bergen, lies the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where tens of thousands of prisoners died, Anne Frank among them. The memorial is a sombre, important place to visit if you have the time and the frame of mind. To the east, the airfield at Faßberg played a major role in the Berlin Airlift of 1948 and 1949, when Western aircraft supplied the blockaded city by air.
For riders, Hermannsburg is a practical fuel stop with a supermarket, bakeries and cafés. The roads through the heath are generally quiet, flat to gently rolling, and pleasant rather than challenging, with long straights through the forests and gentle curves between the villages. Watch out for military vehicles, deer and the occasional tank crossing near the training areas, and for sand on the road surface. The heather blooms from about August to September, and that is the best time to visit, though the heath is beautiful in every season.