Kalkar sits on a low terrace a few kilometres from the Rhine, close to the Dutch border, and everything about the landscape here is flat, wide and bright. The label points to the Bornsches Feld, a field on the edge of town that belongs to the Roman Lower Germanic Limes, the frontier that followed the Rhine itself rather than a wall or a palisade. UNESCO added the whole line to its list in 2021. Here, as elsewhere along the lower river, the Roman forts and camps stood on the river bank, the water served as the barrier, and what remains today is mostly in the ground and in the museums of Xanten, a little way up the Rhine.
Kalkar itself is a handsome surprise. It was a Hanseatic town in the late Middle Ages, and the market square is still lined with gabled brick houses and a stepped town hall. Inside the church of St Nicholas stands a collection of carved altars made by a school of woodcarvers who worked here in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the scale and detail of the figures is staggering for a place of this size. There is also a famous oddity just outside town: a nuclear fast breeder reactor that was built and never switched on, now converted into an amusement park, with a hotel and rides in the cooling tower.
The riding is plain and relaxed. Lower Rhine roads run straight between fields of potatoes, maize and sugar beet, with pollarded willows beside the ditches and poplars on the horizon. Wind can be strong, and the surface is mostly good, but corners are few, and the best moments come from the light across the flat land. The Reichswald forest, to the west, is a larger area of woods and offers tree-lined roads with a little more shade and some gentle undulation. Cyclists are everywhere, especially at weekends, so keep speed sensible and watch at junctions.
Kalkar has several petrol stations on its main roads, plus bakeries and cafés on the market square, and Rees and Uedem are close enough for a change of scene. Spring is the best season, when the polder is green and the cherry trees are in flower, and autumn brings geese from the Arctic, which graze the fields in their thousands. Midsummer is warm and bright, and winter can be raw, grey and extremely windy.