Almost nothing about the E11 was built for it. Like the other European long-distance paths, it is a route assembled by agreement out of trails that already existed, waymarked by the local hiking clubs who maintain them, and the German section reads like an inventory of regional walking culture. The Töddenweg carries it 111 kilometres from Bad Bentheim through Rheine and Mettingen to Osnabrück. The Wittekindsweg takes over for 95 kilometres to Porta Westfalica. Then it works east between the Weser and the Leine through Hameln, Alfeld, Bad Gandersheim and Seesen before climbing into the Harz - Goslar, Bad Harzburg, Wernigerode, Blankenburg, Thale - and dropping out the far side toward Lutherstadt Eisleben. Germany accounts for 996 kilometres of the whole. The Netherlands, from Scheveningen through The Hague, Leiden, Amersfoort and Deventer to the German border, accounts for 355.

The Brandenburg leg is the quiet centre of the whole thing. Coming out of the Fläming hills the path reaches Bad Belzig and then Lehnin Abbey, the Cistercian house the Brandenburg margraves founded and were buried in, before turning into the eastern Havelland - a country of scattered lakes ringed with the ageing holiday resorts the GDR built for its workers, and of old hunting forests that belonged to the Brandenburg-Prussian nobility. It passes Ferch and Caputh, where Einstein kept his summer house, and skirts the Templiner See into Potsdam. From there it crosses Park Babelsberg and threads through Klein Glienicke, a small settlement that the Cold War border cut into an absurd shape and left almost surrounded by the other Germany. The Glienicke Bridge is a few minutes away. Very little of this landscape announces itself; you have to be walking through it.

Long-distance paths usually avoid cities. The E11 does the opposite - it goes in. It enters Berlin through the forest around the Olympic Stadium in Charlottenburg, picks up the Spree and the Landwehr Canal, and follows the water through the middle of the capital before coming out the eastern side at Friedrichshagen and heading up the valley of the little river Erpe. That decision was the point of the 1990s extension. A trail that had spent a decade stopping at a wall now walks the length of the city the wall ran through, and then continues to Frankfurt (Oder) and over the river into Poland.

The Polish section is the longest and the emptiest. It runs northeast through Poznań and Gniezno, crosses the Vistula at Toruń, and continues by Brodnica and Iława - a city whose modern centre exists because the old one was destroyed in the Second World War. Past the railway station at Samborowo a blue-marked stretch leads to the field at Grunwald, where in 1410 a Polish-Lithuanian army defeated the Teutonic Knights; the guide calls it the most important national site of the Polish people, and the trail reaches it through neglected fields and wasteland with the markings sometimes overgrown. Beyond Waplewo the farmland gives way to forest, and two protected areas force a long southern detour before the route swings north again through the Las Warmiński reserve to Olsztyn. It ends at a border post three kilometres from Ogrodniki.

The most dangerous animal on the E11 weighs a few milligrams. Ticks are found along the entire route, often heavily infected with the bacteria that cause Lyme disease, and east of the Harz they can also carry tick-borne encephalitis - which is worth a vaccination before you go. There is no preventive for Lyme, but antibiotics work if it is caught early. You may also meet an adder, a boar, or, less often, a wolf or a lynx; the path is nonetheless mostly safe, and it can be walked in winter by anyone properly dressed and carrying hot drinks. The real logistical problem is Polish distance. Without a tent you need to be able to cover 35 kilometres in a day, because that is sometimes how far apart the beds are - and the bus stops.