Quedlinburg is a town that looks as if someone forgot to demolish it, and the result is a delight. More than a thousand timber-framed houses survive in its old centre, representing every century from the fourteenth to the nineteenth, and the lanes between them are so narrow and so cobbled that a motorcycle feels like an intruder. UNESCO listed the town in 1994 as an outstanding example of a medieval European town, and the claim is hard to argue with. It sits at the northern edge of the Harz mountains, with the rounded forested hills on the horizon to the south and the flat Saxon lowlands to the north.
The town's history goes back to the tenth century, when Henry the Fowler, the first king of the East Frankish realm, was buried here in 936, and the collegiate church on the castle hill, a Romanesque building of grey stone, still holds his tomb. The hill, called the Schlossberg, gives a fine view over the roofs, and the church treasury includes some famous medieval pieces that were once stolen at the end of the Second World War and later recovered. The streets also hold the house of the poet Klopstock, born here in 1724, and a good many small cafes, galleries and wine bars.
The riding around Quedlinburg is varied. To the south the Harz offers winding roads through spruce and beech forest, with a good number of bends and gentle climbs toward the Brocken, northern Germany's highest peak. To the north the plain gives long, easy stretches with little traffic. Cobbled streets in the old centre call for care in the wet, and parts of the centre are pedestrian or have access restrictions, so park at the edge and walk. Weekends in summer and the Christmas season bring crowds.
With about twenty-three thousand people, the town has several petrol stations on its ring roads, and the centre has plenty of places to eat, mostly serving hearty German food and the local beers. The light is best in the evening, when the stone and timber turn warm, and the smell of wood smoke and baking drifts through the lanes. Spend an hour on foot before you ride on; the town rewards slowness better than almost anywhere in the region.