The best traffic-free bike rides around Ellerbek

Very quiet here. The surface is perhaps not very suitable for road bikes.

Beautiful trail, easy to ride. Especially recommended in summer temperatures, as you ride a lot in the shade of the trees.

Even a four- or five-meter-high hill, built for visitors, offers a much better overview of the landscape left behind by decades of peat extraction.

5,810 meters of track remain from the Himmelmoor Peat Railway. Built in 1900, it was used to transport peat from the mining area to the peat works on the eastern edge of the moor, operating on constantly changing routes. Small diesel locomotives, some of which were built in-house, pulled the trains carrying the peat floes until mining ended in 2018. Since 2015, the Himmelmoor Peat Railway Association has offered tours on the remaining line. The association maintains the railway and the industrial facilities. Trains are also regularly used for renaturation work.

Peat cutting, i.e., the above-ground extraction of peat, is no longer economically viable today. Peat as a fuel has largely been replaced by other high-energy fossil fuels. Many large-scale peatlands suitable for industrial extraction have now been drained. New peat cutting areas are only permitted under strict conditions. Raised bogs have an important regulatory effect on the water balance due to the large amounts of precipitation they can absorb. The preservation of the original habitats serves landscape conservation and species protection, as most species of peatland flora and fauna are considered threatened or critically endangered. Bogs grow extremely slowly; an intact peat body increases in thickness by only one millimeter per year. It therefore takes a thousand years for a one-meter-high layer of peat to form. Thus, bog areas recover very slowly during restoration attempts.

A quiet stretch of road with lots of nature

The Kupferteich (Copper Pond) on the border of the Hamburg districts of Poppenbüttel and Lemsahl-Mellingstedt was originally a mill pond and served as a copper mill. It is easily circumnavigated by bike or on foot. It was created by damming the Mellingbek and Twelenbek rivers, which flow from the Wittmoor and join in front of the pond, to a height of approximately 900 meters. In the mill at the Kupferteich, a copper hammer was used to produce panels for roofs, ship floors, and boilers for sugar refineries. Remains of fish ponds can be found at the northern end of the Kupferteich. In the mid-19th century, the Kupferteich became a sawmill, later an oil mill, after which the facility fell into disuse. Due to its dilapidated condition, it was demolished in 1929. The Kupferteich is now an approximately 7.0-hectare fishing lake, and since 2019, it, including its shoreline, has been designated a specially protected biotope area under the Federal Nature Conservation Act. A golf course has stretched east and west of the Kupferteich since the 21st century. There is a dog walking area on the western shore of the pond. Access to the Kupferteich is via the 1.5 km long Kupferteichweg, a road that leads to a sandy path leading to the pond. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kupferteich_(Mellingbek)

I passed through there on September 8, 1925, on my "Bevern and Hemdingen" tour. This tour features many beautiful forest paths.