The Weser makes its last big bends here before Bremen, and Morsum sits just south of the river near Thedinghausen, in a landscape of dykes, meadows and old marsh villages. This is not the Morsum on Sylt that most Germans know but a small farming place in the flat country between Verden and Bremen, where the river shapes everything.
Thedinghausen has a fine Renaissance manor house, the Erbhof, built in the early seventeenth century in the ornate style of the Weser Renaissance, with decorated gables and a small park. It is now used for events and exhibitions.
Verden, to the east, is a horse town, famous for its auctions of Hanoverian horses, and it has an old cathedral and a pleasant old town. Just outside it, the Sachsenhain, a grove of standing stones, commemorates the Saxons said to have been executed on Charlemagne's orders in 782 during his wars of conquest, one of the darkest episodes of that era.
The dykes along the Weser make for fine riding, with long views over the floodplain, where cattle graze and storks nest on the farm roofs in summer. The roads are flat and straight, and the surface is generally good, but the wind can be strong and the narrow dyke roads require care when meeting tractors.
For fuel, Thedinghausen and Langwedel are the reliable options; the small villages may have nothing. Bremen, half an hour north, has everything else, including one of the great old town squares of northern Germany, with its Roland statue and the Town Musicians of the fairy tale.