Burgsalach is a quiet village of about twelve hundred people on the high limestone plateau of the Franconian Jura, and the old frontier of the Roman Empire ran right across it. This was the Raetian Limes, a different beast from the timber palisade further north. Here the Romans built in stone, and the remains of the wall, which locals long ascribed to the devil and called the Teufelsmauer, still show up as a low line in the fields and woods. The towers along it were numbered by archaeologists, which is why the label is a string of figures rather than a name.
The riding is a pleasure of the minor roads. The area lies between Weißenburg in Bayern and the Altmühl valley, in the Altmühl Jura, a landscape of dry limestone hills, juniper heaths, small beech woods and wide arable fields. The lanes link small villages in gentle curves and easy hills, with little traffic outside the commuting hours. The surface is generally good, although farm tractors leave mud in harvest season, and the wind can sweep across the open plateau. Late spring and early autumn have the best light, with long views across fields to the wooded edges.
Do not expect services at the exact spot. The nearest town of any size is Weißenburg, a little over eight kilometres away, where there is fuel, food and a decent old town ringed by medieval walls. Weißenburg also has the best Roman material in the area, including a bath complex and a museum that displays a treasure hoard dug up there in 1979. If you only have time for one Roman stop in the region, that is the one to pick.
What makes the Limes interesting here is how undramatic it is. There is no monument, only an old boundary line that bends across ordinary countryside and shows that the empire once drew a line in this very field. Take a moment to look along it; the people who built it expected it to last.