After the dinosaurs at Rehburg-Loccum, Petershagen was a completely different kind of stop. Instead of prehistoric footprints and reconstructed animals, this part of the journey was about the Weser, flat countryside, old villages and an extraordinary number of windmills and storks.
Petershagen is slightly confusing at first because the name describes much more than the small historic town beside the river. The present municipality covers around 212 square kilometres and contains 29 different villages and settlements on both sides of the Weser. It was only created in its present form in 1973, when those previously independent communities were brought together.
The river is what connects them.
Petershagen sits north of Minden, where the Weser has already escaped from the hills around Porta Westfalica and entered the much flatter North German Plain. From here the river runs through broad fields, floodplains and small villages, and the landscape feels noticeably more open.
The history of the place begins with the river as well.
In the year 784, Charlemagne was travelling east during his campaigns against the Saxons when flooding prevented him from crossing the Weser here. The Frankish records mention a settlement called Huculvi, regarded as the predecessor of modern Petershagen. That makes the area’s written history more than 1,200 years old.
The name Petershagen came much later.
In 1306, Gottfried von Waldeck, the Prince-Bishop of Minden, built a castle beside the Weser. It was named Petershagen after Saint Peter, the patron saint of the diocese, and eventually the name of the castle replaced the older name of the settlement.
The fortress was transformed between 1545 and 1547 into the Renaissance building that forms the basis of Schloss Petershagen today. The architect was Jörg Unkair, one of the important figures in what became known as the Weser Renaissance, a regional architectural style found particularly along the Weser during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
The castle was not simply a decorative residence. Petershagen was politically important because the bishops of Minden used it as one of their main seats. After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 dissolved the Prince-Bishopric and transferred the territory to Brandenburg, the castle briefly became the governmental centre of the new Principality of Minden.
For a period, therefore, this small town beside the Weser was much more politically important than its present size suggests.
The strangest border episode came under Napoleon.
In 1810, this area was divided directly by the Weser. Territory on the western side of the river became part of the French Empire, while the eastern side remained within the Kingdom of Westphalia. The same river that now joins the different districts of Petershagen was temporarily an international political boundary.
The Weser continued to determine everyday life for much longer. An old wooden bridge had been destroyed by ice centuries earlier, and ferry crossings remained important. A permanent modern road bridge across the Weser at Petershagen was not completed until 1970.
There are still ferries in the wider municipality today. One of the more unusual is the small Weser ferry between Hävern and Windheim, used by pedestrians and cyclists and forming part of several routes through the river landscape.
But the feature that surprised us most about Petershagen was the number of mills.
This is part of the Mühlenkreis Minden-Lübbecke, literally the “mill district”, an area that has preserved an unusually large collection of working historic mills. Petershagen alone has around eleven restored mills of different types.
They are not all the same either. There are traditional tower windmills, post mills and watermills, and some remain operational during special milling and baking days between spring and autumn. Several still demonstrate the machinery rather than existing only as static monuments.
One of the best-known is Büschings Mühle in Petershagen itself, but the wider municipality contains mills at places including Heimsen, Großenheerse, Meßlingen, Seelenfeld, Döhren and Bierde.
The Meßlingen windmill has an especially unusual double fantail system, while Döhren preserves an old water-powered sawmill. In a landscape this flat and exposed, it is easy to understand why wind became such a useful source of mechanical energy.
The mills also fit the geography of the journey unusually well. You do not necessarily need to make each one a separate destination. They appear across the countryside as you move between the villages, often surrounded by fields rather than urban development.
Then there are the storks.
Petershagen describes itself as the stork capital of North Rhine-Westphalia, and this is one title that has a real numerical basis. More than 50 breeding pairs return to the area, making the Weser floodplain around Petershagen one of the most important white-stork areas in the state.
The combination of wetlands, meadows, farmland and shallow water provides the feeding habitat the birds need. Large nests appear on poles, roofs and specially constructed platforms throughout the villages.
There is even a Westphalian Stork Museum at Windheim, housed in a historic farm complex close to the Weser. The museum explains the biology of the birds but also their long relationship with people, from old folklore to the modern conservation work that allowed storks to return after their numbers had fallen badly in Germany.
That makes Petershagen one of the places where the landscape itself is more important than a conventional list of attractions. The castle and historic centre are interesting, but much of the character lies outside the centre: along the river, beside mills and in the small villages.
There is also a reminder of a much darker part of German history in the centre. Petershagen’s former synagogue was built in 1845–46. After restoration it became an information and documentation centre devoted to local Jewish history. It is a small building compared with the castle, but an important part of understanding the town rather than presenting only its picturesque side.
For us, Petershagen worked particularly well after Rehburg-Loccum because there was almost no similarity between the two stops. One was dominated by dinosaurs and deep geological time; here the scale returned to human history and an ordinary-looking river landscape that turned out to contain medieval bishops, Napoleon, mills, ferries and one of the largest concentrations of storks in the region.
Petershagen is not a place where one enormous monument explains everything.
The Weser does that instead.
It determined where the settlement began, where the castle was built, how people crossed the area, where borders were drawn and how the villages developed. Today it also creates the wetlands and open countryside that make the storks possible.
The mills, castle and villages are the visible history around it, but the river is the part that has been there throughout.