The Romans got to Xanten first, and the forest roads of Hochwald 6 lead you to the town they left behind. About seven kilometres from the point, on the Rhine plain, lies the site of Colonia Ulpia Traiana, a Roman city founded in the early second century under Trajan. Most of it was later quarried for building stone, which is why the Archaeological Park today can rebuild the amphitheatre, a gate and some of the city walls on their original footprints, and why you can stand in a reconstructed temple and imagine the Rhine frontier at its busiest.
Xanten has older layers too. The cathedral of St Viktor, a long Gothic church with a forest of pillars, commemorates a martyr said to have died here with his comrades in the Roman army; the town's name comes from the Latin for holy ones, sanctos. And the Nibelungenlied, the medieval German epic, places the hero Siegfried's birth in a city it calls Santen, so Xanten leans on that too, with a Siegfried museum and the occasional dragon on a shop sign.
Out in the Hochwald itself the riding is quiet, flat and straightforward, and there is little to do but watch the tree trunks flick by. The roads are narrow, hemmed by ditches, and the surface is often patched where the heavy farm machinery tears at the edges. In summer the woods are a relief from the heat of the plain; in winter, fog and frost can settle among the trunks and hold the tarmac slick until midday. Keep an eye out for deer at dusk, and expect cyclists even on gloomy afternoons.
Xanten, a town of over twenty thousand, has fuel, supermarkets, cafés and a market square where you can sit under the cathedral's towers with a coffee and a slice of apple tart. The lakes south of the town, flooded gravel pits turned into sailing and swimming water, are good for a break on hot days. Uedem and Kalkar are close alternatives for petrol.
Pick a clear day in May, when the Archaeological Park is green and the forest is fresh, and give the Roman town an hour or two before you turn back.