Dig under the Domplein in Utrecht and you hit a Roman fort. That is not a figure of speech: when the city was rebuilt after the great storm that brought down the nave of the cathedral in 1674, the foundations were already sitting on the foundations of something much older. The Romans built a fort here around the middle of the first century, on a low sandy rise beside the Rhine, and called it Traiectum, the crossing. When the legions left, the name stuck, and a thousand years of sound changes turned it into Utrecht.
The square is the middle of the story. On one side stands the Dom Tower, at 112 metres the tallest church tower in the Netherlands, finished in the fourteenth century and still the thing you steer by from half the province. Beside it is the gap where the nave used to be, because the storm of 1674 took it away and nobody ever rebuilt it, so the tower and the choir now stand apart across an open square. The saint who started it all was Willibrord, an Anglo-Saxon missionary who arrived around 690 and became the first bishop here, and for centuries Utrecht was the religious capital of the Low Countries.
For a rider this is a place to park and walk. The old centre is a tangle of canals with wharf cellars, narrow lanes and one-way streets, with a lot of cyclists who have never heard of motorbikes, and parking is the real puzzle. Use a garage on the edge and cross the last few hundred metres on foot. The ring roads around the city are fast, camera-heavy and congested at rush hour, so aim for a mid-morning arrival or a weekend. Fuel and food are no trouble in a city of nearly three hundred thousand.
The Oudegracht, the old canal that runs through the centre below street level, is the thing to look at after the cathedral. Its quays sit two storeys below the pavement, with vaulted cellars that were once warehouses and are now cafes, so you drink your coffee at water level while the bicycles clatter overhead. Grey days suit it, and so does the carillon, which rings out over the rooftops. Rain is frequent and always short.
Cycle out of town in any direction and the land flattens into polder, but that is another story, and the way to the north leads to Schokland, the former island that is now a field.