CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A 189 km round trip from Alfeld - roughly 2 h 56 in the saddle. The stops in between: St Mary's Catholic Cathedral, Mines of Rammelsberg and Historic Town of and back through St Mary's Catholic Cathedral. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
Speed drops and stays down. Park rather than crawl through. 28 km through ground somebody thought worth listing. The road passes it rather than bypassing it.
Stand across the railway tracks and look at the Fagus works, and you are looking at one of the buildings where modern architecture started. In 1911 the shoe-last maker Carl Benscheidt hired a young Walter Gropius and his partner Adolf Meyer to design a new factory in Alfeld, in the Leine valley of Lower Saxony. They gave it walls of glass that seem to wrap around the corners with no column to hold them, a radical trick at the time, and the result was so influential that it became a UNESCO site in 2011. The best part: it is still a working factory making shoe lasts, not a museum frozen in place.
Read the complete Fagus Factory in Alfeld write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Fagus Factory in Alfeld is where the day begins. Next is St Mary's Catholic Cathedral.
In the courtyard of Hildesheim Cathedral, a rose bush climbs the wall of the apse, and the legend says it has been growing there for a thousand years. The "thousand-year rose" is linked to the founding of the bishopric in 815, when, so the story goes, Emperor Louis the Pious hung a reliquary on the branches of a wild rose and found it impossible to remove, taking it as a sign to build a chapel. Whatever the truth, the rose survived the bombing of March 1945, which destroyed the cathedral and much of the old town, and sprouted again from its roots in the rubble. The cathedral and the nearby Church of St Michael were inscribed by UNESCO in 1985 for their outstanding Romanesque architecture and art.
Read the complete St Mary's Catholic Cathedral write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
St Mary's Catholic Cathedral comes up about 32 km into the recorded legs. Next is Mines of Rammelsberg and Historic Town of.
Goslar is a small city at the northern edge of the Harz, and it is hard to overstate how much money and power sat here in the Middle Ages. The Rammelsberg hill, just south of the town, held a vast body of silver, lead, copper and zinc ore, and mining went on for about a thousand years, until the mine closed in 1988. The Ottonian and Salian emperors built their palace in Goslar because the silver paid for it. The imperial palace, the Kaiserpfalz, still stands in a big, over-restored form on the edge of the old town. UNESCO listed the mine and the old town together in 1992, and in 2010 the Upper Harz water system was added to the same site.
Read the complete Mines of Rammelsberg and Historic Town of write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 94 km into the recorded legs you reach Mines of Rammelsberg and Historic Town of. Next is back through St Mary's Catholic Cathedral.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete St Mary's Catholic Cathedral write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through St Mary's Catholic Cathedral, late in the day. Next is Fagus Factory in Alfeld.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Fagus Factory in Alfeld write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Fagus Factory in Alfeld. That is the ride.
Fagus Factory in Alfeld → St Mary's Catholic Cathedral is 32 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
St Mary's Catholic Cathedral → Mines of Rammelsberg and Historic Town of is 62 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Mines of Rammelsberg and Historic Town of → back through St Mary's Catholic Cathedral is 62 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through St Mary's Catholic Cathedral → Fagus Factory in Alfeld is 33 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.