Harburger Berge and Lüneburg Connector
A 569 km loop from Hannover north edge
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Why this ride
Forest shade and northern sweepers that feel far from the ring road. Out of Hannover and back again: 569 km, roughly 10 h 21 in the saddle. It goes by way of Warmsen, Berge, Morsum and Lüneburg. Much of it runs through woodland.
Roadbook
- Hannover
start
Hannover does not seek attention, which is part of its character. The capital of Lower Saxony, with about half a million people, is a flat, green, practical city on the Leine river, famous for its trade fairs, and for speaking what Germans consider the purest standard German. Large parts of the centre were destroyed in the Second World War, and the rebuilding is mostly plain, but there are fine things inside it: the Herrenhausen Gardens, a baroque garden of clipped hedges and fountains, the Maschsee, a big lake laid out in the 1930s where locals sail and jog, and the new town hall, a copper-domed building from 1913 with a lift that rises inside the dome.
Hannover also has deep historical links. The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz lived and worked here for decades as librarian and adviser to the dukes. And the dukes became kings of Great Britain in 1714, when the Elector of Hanover took the British throne as George I, so for more than a century, the same family ruled both places.
This stop, on the western edge near Seelze, is a return point more than a destination. The Leine and the Mittelland Canal run through the area, with industrial buildings, harbour cranes, allotments and low houses. It is the place where a day of countryside ends and the city begins, and where traffic starts to slow.
Practical matters are straightforward. Fuel is available at stations on the main roads, and the supermarkets and bakeries open early. Rush hour, between about seven and nine in the morning and four and six in the evening, is heavy, and the motorways around the city, especially the A2, can be jammed, so plan to arrive outside those times. Parking for a motorcycle in the city centre is easy to find, and the tram network is efficient if you want to leave the bike. For a quiet evening, the Maschsee shore is a good place to walk.
- Warmsen
fuel
If you pass through in October or November, listen. The moors of the Diepholz lowland, a short way north-west of here, are one of the great resting places for migrating cranes in Germany, and on autumn evenings thousands of them come in to roost with a sound like distant bugles. Warmsen sits on the southern fringe of that country, a farming village between Uchte and the Weser, in a landscape so flat that a church spire counts as a landmark.
Much of the land around was once raised bog. The Uchter Moor, close by, was cut for peat for generations and is now being re-wetted, slowly turning back into a wild place of heather, cotton grass and pools. On grey days the horizon seems to dissolve into the sky, and the light has that soft, washed northern quality that painters from Worpswede made famous further north.
South-east, Petershagen sits on the Weser, at the heart of a district that has restored dozens of old windmills and watermills and linked them into a signposted mill route. Some open on summer weekends and grind flour as they did two centuries ago. The town itself has a riverside castle and a quiet old centre.
As a fuel stop, keep it simple. Warmsen is small, so if there is no open pump in the village, Uchte, a few minutes away, or Petershagen on the river are the dependable choices. Riding here is all about long straight roads lined with oak and birch, brick farmhouses with huge barn doors, and wind that can blow unchecked across the open fields. Watch for mud from tractors in harvest season and for deer at the forest edges.
It is not a place for excitement, but it is honest country, and a good one to cover kilometres in while your mind wanders.
- Berge
sight
North of Osnabrück the land rises into a low, wooded ridge, the Ankumer Höhe, a moraine left by the glaciers of the penultimate ice age, and around it the countryside rolls gently with fields, hedges and old farmsteads. Berge is a village on the western side of that ridge, between Bippen and Fürstenau, in a district that Stone Age farmers settled thousands of years ago.
Their monuments are still here. The whole region between the Emsland and Osnabrück is scattered with megalithic passage graves, great boulders arranged into chambers by people who farmed this land five thousand years ago, and a signposted Route of Megalithic Culture links dozens of them. Many lie in woods or at field edges, mossy and silent, and they are free to visit.
Ankum, a few kilometres east, has a church so large for a small town that locals call it the Artland Cathedral, its tower visible for miles. To the north lies the Artland itself, around Quakenbrück, famous for its great half-timbered farmhouses with carved gables and inscriptions, built by wealthy farmers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The riding is gentle and pleasant, with smooth roads curving over the low hills and through woods. The Ankumer Höhe gives some of the few real bends in this part of Lower Saxony, and the views from the higher ground stretch across the flat plain to the north. Traffic is light, apart from farm machinery in season.
Fürstenau and Ankum are the places for fuel and food. Ankum's market square has cafés, and in late summer the farm shops along the roads sell potatoes, honey and sausage from their own animals. It is a quiet, contented corner of Germany, and it rewards a slow pace.
- Morsum
fuel
The Weser makes its last big bends here before Bremen, and Morsum sits just south of the river near Thedinghausen, in a landscape of dykes, meadows and old marsh villages. This is not the Morsum on Sylt that most Germans know but a small farming place in the flat country between Verden and Bremen, where the river shapes everything.
Thedinghausen has a fine Renaissance manor house, the Erbhof, built in the early seventeenth century in the ornate style of the Weser Renaissance, with decorated gables and a small park. It is now used for events and exhibitions.
Verden, to the east, is a horse town, famous for its auctions of Hanoverian horses, and it has an old cathedral and a pleasant old town. Just outside it, the Sachsenhain, a grove of standing stones, commemorates the Saxons said to have been executed on Charlemagne's orders in 782 during his wars of conquest, one of the darkest episodes of that era.
The dykes along the Weser make for fine riding, with long views over the floodplain, where cattle graze and storks nest on the farm roofs in summer. The roads are flat and straight, and the surface is generally good, but the wind can be strong and the narrow dyke roads require care when meeting tractors.
For fuel, Thedinghausen and Langwedel are the reliable options; the small villages may have nothing. Bremen, half an hour north, has everything else, including one of the great old town squares of northern Germany, with its Roland statue and the Town Musicians of the fairy tale.
- Lüneburg
sight
Salt made Lüneburg, and the town looks as though it knows it. For more than a thousand years the brine springs under the old town were boiled down into white gold, which was carted to Lübeck and shipped across the Baltic to preserve herring, and the profits built a city of tall brick gables, grand merchant houses and a town hall that grew by accretion across six centuries.
The salt that made the city also threatens it. The ground has sunk in places, as the brine was pumped out, and a few streets near the old salt works lean at odd angles, with houses tilting and church towers bent. The effect is surreal and charming, and it adds to the sense of an old town that is constantly shifting. The old harbour district, with its brick crane and its gabled warehouses, is the prettiest corner, and a cafe by the water is a good spot for a coffee.
Lüneburg is also the gateway to the Lüneburg Heath, a wide landscape of sandy hills, junipers and purple heather that is one of the best known in Germany. The heather blooms in late August and September, and the heath sheep, the Heidschnucken, graze among the shrubs. The town's cuisine reflects that: roast Heidschnucke, buckwheat cakes with local cranberries, and heather honey. The roads around the heath are straight and quiet, with the surface mostly good and the traffic light, and a ride at dawn, with mist over the heather, is a memorable experience.
Reppenstedt, four kilometres away, is a large village with supermarkets and fuel. The Elbe is a short ride to the north, with its dike roads and ferries, while to the south the heath rises gently towards the Wilseder Berg, the highest point in the region. The old town is partly pedestrian, so leave the bike on the edge and walk in. In the evening, the brick glows in the low sun, and the lanes fill with students from the university. Stay for dinner, and linger.
- Hannover finish