Schleswig is a town you eat in with history around your ears. The quickest way to understand it is to walk to the harbour on the Schlei, where fish smokehouses and small restaurants sit beside a basin of yachts and the old cathedral spire rises over the roofs behind. Smoked herring, Schlei eel and fried plaice are all on offer, with potatoes and a pot of tea or coffee, and a table by the water on a warm day is hard to beat. Prices are fair, portions generous, and nobody hurries you.
A few kilometres south lies the Danewerk, the great line of earthen ramparts that the Danes built across the narrow neck of the Jutland peninsula, beginning as early as the fifth century and extended over the next six hundred years. It was a defensive wall against the Germans and Franks, and its remains, grassy banks several metres high, can still be walked. At one end stood the Viking trading town of Haithabu, which lay on the Schlei and was among the largest settlements in northern Europe about a thousand years ago. Both are listed as a World Heritage site, and the museum at Haithabu has reconstructed longhouses and a remarkable collection of finds.
In the town itself, on an island in the Schlei, stands Gottorf Castle, a huge, pale baroque pile that was the seat of the dukes of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf. It now houses two state museums, one of art and one of archaeology, and the archaeology museum has one of the most extraordinary collections in Germany, including a large wooden ship from the fourth century found in a Danish bog, and the bodies of Iron Age people preserved in peat. It is a strange and sobering place to spend an hour.
The ride in and out is simple, with quiet farmland roads in every direction and a long, open approach along the Schlei from the east. Schleswig has about twenty-four thousand people, so fuel stations, supermarkets and bakeries are all easy, and parking near the harbour is straightforward, if the cobbles around the old town are rough. Weekends in summer fill the harbour with visitors, so arrive before noon. After a meal, you can go on along the Schlei toward Kappeln or turn west toward the North Sea coast.