The Kottenforst is a big, flat-topped wooded ridge south-west of Bonn, an island of oak and hornbeam in a landscape of fields and commuter towns. It was a hunting forest of the Electors of Cologne, and the straight avenues that cut through it, still named Allee, were laid out in the eighteenth century so that a hunting party could ride after game, or follow falcons, in a precise geometric pattern. Elector Clemens August, who built the Augustusburg palace at Brühl and the little hunting lodge of Falkenlust beside it, loved heron hunting with falcons, and the avenues were part of that grand and slightly absurd game.
The Wattendorfer Allee is one of those straight lines. Riding or walking here, you notice first how quiet it is. The woods are tall and cool, with beech and oak overhead, pale green in spring and rusty in November, and a smell of leaf mould and damp earth. Deer are common at dusk, and woodpeckers drum in the dead limbs. The forest also carries a good share of horses, hikers and cyclists, so a motorcycle should be used on the public roads only and the forest tracks left to people on feet and hooves.
For the rider, the pleasure is on the approach rather than the avenue itself. The roads that cross the Kottenforst and drop towards Wachtberg and the Rhine are gently winding, often tree-lined, and not very fast, with a surface that suffers from tree roots and winter frosts. From the western edge you can sometimes look east across the valley to the Siebengebirge, the cluster of rounded volcanic hills above Königswinter, with the Drachenfels as the best-known summit. On sunny weekends the tourist traffic from Bonn is thick, so a weekday morning is far better.
Wachtberg, three or four kilometres away, is a large municipality of twenty thousand people with fuel, bakeries and a few places for lunch, and Meckenheim and Königswinter are both within reach if you need more choice. This is a place for a calm hour between more demanding roads, to listen to the trees and look at the shapes cut by an eighteenth-century aristocrat who preferred geometry to nature.