Enchanting East Westphalia — two days on the Lönspfad Trail

In the south of Germany's East Westphalia, where the Teutoburg Forest merges with the Egge Mountains near Horn-Bad Meinberg, there are natural landscapes unique to the region. Small valleys that you might expect in the Harz Mountains, huge caves, the flowering heath of the Senne and some good-natured four-legged friends that you probably haven't met in the wild – the eastern Teutoburg Forest has lots of surprises in store for you and they’re all connected by the Lönspfad.

Over 45 kilometres (28 mi), the eventful Lönspfad connects Leopoldstal with Oerlinghausen. In this Collection, I present the hiking trail in two stages, making it easy to walk on a weekend. There are climbs and narrow, rooty paths but also wide forest trails and sandy sections waiting for you. You’ll meet Scottish Highland cattle and Exmoor ponies in the Wistinghauser Senne. In keeping with the heath landscape of the Senne, which you’ll get to know on the Lönspfad, the trail was named after the famous heath poet Hermann Löns. Among other things, he was responsible for the founding of the Lüneburg Heath Nature Park in 1911.

You can reach the starting point of the trail at Leopoldstal by train from Herford and Altenbeken. If you hike both stages, you can also use the train again from the Oerlinghausen. After the first stage in Berlebeck, you can stay overnight at the guesthouse ‘Haus am Wasserfall’. If you only want to walk one of the two stages, you can also use the bus connection to Detmold in Berlebeck and then take the train again.

The Lönspfad offers you many things in the middle of East Westphalia that you’d usually encounter in higher low mountain regions. When the sun breaks through the trees in the Silberbach Valley, you get your first glimpse of the enchanting Senn landscape and get to know the unspoiled nature of Wistinghausen.

Need some reading material for your hike? Try Hermann Löns’s work, ‘My Green Book’. In it, Löns describes his own experiences and dives deep into his favourite landscapes. Löns writes: ‘And breathing a long sigh of relief, when I am at the edge of the forest and look into the deep stream valley, where all kinds of colours are, I realise that I was saving air all the way in the forest to be quiet, because everything around me was so quiet.’ Simply beautiful.