The Altstadt holds around 450 half-timbered houses, most raised between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and walking it feels less like touring a museum than like walking through the inside of a carved chest. The frames are oak, the infill brick and plaster, and the beams carry inscriptions — owners' names, dates, prayers against fire. The Hoppener Haus of 1532 carries a portrait of Duke Ernest the Confessor, who brought the Reformation to Celle in 1524; the oldest house in town went up in 1526.

The Old Town Hall wears a stepped gable in the Weser Renaissance manner, and the Ratskeller in its cellar has been pouring drinks since 1378 — one of the oldest pubs in Lower Saxony. Twice a day a trumpeter climbs the tower of the Stadtkirche and plays a fanfare out over the roofs.

Celle first appears in writing in 993 as Kiellu, "fishing bay." The town proper is younger and deliberate: Duke Otto the Strict judged the old seat at Altencelle no longer fit, laid out a new settlement beside the present castle, and granted it town rights in 1301, the year work began on the town church.

From 1378 to 1705 Celle was a ducal residence, first of the dukes of Saxe-Wittenberg, then, from 1433, of the princes of Lüneburg, a branch of the house of Brunswick-Lüneburg from which the British royal family descends. Under Duke George William in the later seventeenth century the fortress turned into a palace, gardens replaced earthworks, and a court theatre was fitted out in 1674 — still in use, and the oldest working theatre in Germany. When the last duke died in 1705 the town passed to the electors of Hanover, and when George of Hanover became George I of Great Britain, Celle went with him.

Caroline Matilda was fifteen when she was married to her cousin Christian VII of Denmark, and eighteen when she began an affair with the king's physician, Johann Friedrich Struensee, who for a short and startling period effectively governed the country. The court broke them both: Struensee was executed on 28 April 1772, three weeks after the marriage was dissolved, and her two children stayed behind in Denmark. Her brother George III had her housed in the family's Hanoverian lands, and on 20 October 1772 she arrived at Celle Castle, aged twenty-one.

She lived quietly for two and a half years, with German and English books, a small theatre built for her inside the castle, and a reputation for looking after the town's poor children and orphans. Scarlet fever killed her on 10 May 1775, at twenty-three. She was buried three days later in the crypt of the Stadtkirche, and her memorial stands in the French Garden south of the old town.

Celle's synagogue of 1740 still stands. On the night of 9 November 1938 the men who came to burn it found it wedged into a narrow lane beside a leather factory and the timber houses of the Altstadt, and they had brought no ladders; the damage stopped about two metres above the floor.

On 8 April 1945 a freight train stood in the goods yard carrying roughly four thousand concentration camp prisoners — Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Dutch and French men and women from Drütte, a subcamp of Neuengamme — on their way to Bergen-Belsen. It stood beside an ammunition train. When the raid came, the ammunition went up and the wagons burned.

Survivors ran for the Neustadt wood. Over the next two days SS guards, Gestapo men, local party officials, firefighters and ordinary residents of Celle went after them with rifles, in what the town itself called the Celler Hasenjagd — the Celle hare hunt. Between two and three hundred people were shot; the true figure has never been established. Of the four thousand who had been on that train, 487 reached Bergen-Belsen on 10 April, and Celle surrendered to British troops without resistance two days later.

The trial opened in December 1947. Seven of fourteen defendants were acquitted; three were sentenced to death, of which one was overturned and two commuted. Every convicted man was free by October 1952. On the anniversary in 1992 a copper beech was planted in the Triftanlagen park.

A short walk from the palace, the Lower Saxon State Stud has been breeding horses since 27 July 1735, when George II — king in Britain, elector in Hanover — signed it into existence. It keeps about 130 breeding stallions, all Hanoverians, and in late September and early October puts many of them through a three-hour parade of dressage sets, work under saddle and driving teams of up to thirteen horses.

North of town the Lüneburg Heath begins: sand, pine, birch and open purple heather, canoe water on the Örtze, cycle tracks threading the Südheide nature park. Celle is its southern gate — a town that kept its timber because the bombs mostly missed it, and keeps a memorial because what came after them did not.