The Lone is a small river in the Swabian Jura, east of Ulm, that often vanishes underground in dry weather, slipping into the limestone and leaving its bed empty. Its quiet valley, flanked by wooded slopes and limestone cliffs, holds caves where some of the oldest figurative art in the world was found. In the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave, fragments of a figure carved from mammoth ivory were pieced together into the Lion Man, a being with a human body and a lion's head, around forty thousand years old. In the Vogelherd cave, tiny ivory animals, a horse, a mammoth, a cave lion, emerged from the sediment.
These caves, together with others in the nearby Ach valley, were inscribed by UNESCO in 2017 as the Caves and Ice Age Art in the Swabian Jura. The Archaeopark at Vogelherd lets you walk up to the cave and see some of the finds, and the Lion Man himself lives in the museum in Ulm. Standing at the mouth of a cave where people sat by the fire and carved these figures while mammoths roamed the valley below is a humbling experience.
The landscape is gentle and rural, with fields, meadows and patches of beech forest on the plateau, and the Lone valley winding through it. The roads are smooth, quiet and mostly straight, with some pleasant curves where they dip into the valley or climb back onto the plateau. Traffic is light except near Ulm and on the main roads, and the riding is relaxed rather than thrilling. Late spring and early autumn are lovely, and the valley is particularly beautiful in the soft light of evening.
Langenau, a market town seven kilometres south, has fuel and a supermarket, and Niederstotzingen, a little closer, covers the basics. The Archaeopark at the Vogelherd has a café with a terrace overlooking the valley, and the village inns serve Swabian classics: Maultaschen, the large pasta parcels filled with meat and spinach, Käsespätzle with fried onions, and lentils with sausages. Ulm, half an hour away, is the place to meet the Lion Man in person, and its minster has the tallest church spire in the world, with a dizzying staircase for anyone whose legs survived the ride.