Rütte sits on the gentle southern slope above Lake Biel, a scatter of farms and orchards between the village of Bellmund and the lakeshore, with the long blue ridge of the Jura filling the view across the water. Nidau and the city of Biel are a few minutes away, yet up here it feels thoroughly rural: cows, cherry trees, a sharp smell of cut grass in early summer and the clank of a tractor somewhere below.
The reason it appears on a heritage map lies under the water and the peat along the shore. Around five to seven thousand years ago, Neolithic and Bronze Age farmers built villages on piles at the edges of the Swiss lakes, and Lake Biel is one of the richest places for their remains. The prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps were listed by UNESCO in 2011, and finds from this shore, from pottery to wooden posts preserved in the mud, have helped archaeologists date these settlements almost to the year. There is nothing dramatic to see at the site itself; the story is told in the museums of Biel, but knowing what lies just offshore changes how you look at the reeds.
The riding is short and sweet. The lanes above the lake loop through Bellmund, Ipsach and Sutz with gentle curves, good tarmac and views opening up between the farmhouses, and you can ride on along the south shore towards Erlach and its old castle. Across the lake, the vineyard road through Twann and Ligerz clings to the Jura foot, and above it the climbs to the Chasseral or over the Jura passes give real corners. Swiss rules apply: motorway vignette required, speed limits enforced strictly and expensively, and village speed zones that change without much warning.
For fuel and food, Nidau and Biel have everything you need. On a summer evening, take a boat out to St Peter's Island, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent a few happy weeks in 1765 and later wrote that he had never been so content. With a glass of local Chasselas in hand and the sun setting behind the Jura, you might understand him.