The Kiel Canal is the busiest artificial waterway in the world, measured by the number of ships, and in Rendsburg you can see why. The town sits right on its bank, and ships glide silently through the middle of the landscape, appearing over the fields like something out of a dream. Opened in 1895 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal, it cuts across the neck of the Jutland peninsula, linking the North Sea and the Baltic and saving vessels a long and stormy voyage around Denmark.
Free ferries still cross the canal at several places, a cheerful survival in a country that likes to charge for things, and the bank roads give you a quiet, straight run beside the water. You can stop on a bank and watch a tanker or a container ship go by, so close that you can see the crew. The sheer size of the vessels in a landscape of cornfields never quite loses its strangeness.
Rendsburg is a town of twenty-eight thousand, on the old frontier between Holstein and Schleswig, which was marked by the Eider river. The medieval centre is small, and the real attractions are the old arsenal and the garrison buildings. Next door, in Büdelsdorf, the Carlshütte ironworks, founded in the 1820s, has been turned into an art venue that hosts a big sculpture show every summer, an unexpected treat in a small town.
Fuel and food are no problem here, and there are plenty of bakeries, cafés and supermarkets. If the day is fine, find a bench on the canal bank, with a coffee, and let the ships go by. The air smells of diesel and cut grass, and the horn blasts echo across the fields. It is a calm, surprisingly absorbing place to spend half an hour.