The hills are moraines - ridges of sand and gravel dumped by the last Ice Age and never levelled since. The highest of them, the Wilseder Berg, reaches 169.2 metres, which is not a mountain by anyone's reckoning, but the plain around it is flat enough that on a clear day you can see Hamburg from the summit. The original woodland was birch, pine and sessile oak. Clearing and grazing replaced it with open heath on sandy ground that would grow heather and very little else, and heather is what the visitors come for: through August and September the whole expanse turns purple and loud with honeybees. Modern fertiliser has since made much of the old heath farmable, so what remains survives on management - chiefly the Heidschnucke, the grey moorland sheep whose appetite and hardiness keep the woods from creeping back in.

Germany's tradition of large-scale landscape protection starts here. Wilhelm Bode, a pastor at Egestorf, campaigned through the first decade of the twentieth century to save the heath from the plough and the pine plantation, and in 1921 a police ordinance placed more than 200 square kilometres under protection - the first time anything on that scale had been achieved in Germany. The reserve covers the High Heath at the region's centre, still the most rugged part of it. Wilsede, the village in the middle, takes no through traffic: you walk in, cycle in, or ride from the car parks at Overhaverbeek and Niederhaverbeek behind a horse. Around the High Heath lie the wooded South Heath towards Celle, the largely cultivated East Heath, the farm country of the Uelzen Basin, and the river-cut ridges of the Luhe Heath in the north.

On 4 May 1945, on a low rise of sandy ground near Wendisch Evern southeast of Lüneburg, German representatives signed the instrument surrendering all German forces in the Netherlands, in north-west Germany including the islands, in Denmark, and every naval vessel in those waters, to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. This was not the surrender that ended the war - that came three days later at Reims and again at Karlshorst on 8 May - but it stopped the fighting across an enormous stretch of northern Europe, and it happened in a tent among the heather. There is nothing about the ground to suggest it. That is the disconcerting thing about the heath generally: it holds a great deal and shows almost none of it.

Southwest of the village of Bergen, on the southern heath near Celle, the British 11th Armoured Division entered a camp on the afternoon of 15 April 1945 and found around 60,000 people still alive and 13,000 dead lying unburied. Bergen-Belsen had opened in 1940 as a prisoner-of-war camp; the SS converted part of it into a concentration camp in April 1943. Between 50,000 and 70,000 people died there, including nearly 20,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and more than 35,000 in the early months of 1945 alone, when the camp filled with prisoners driven west from other camps and typhus moved through it unchecked. Anne Frank and her sister Margot died here in February or March, weeks before the soldiers arrived. The huts were burned to stop the epidemic, so there are no buildings to walk through - only the mass graves, with tens of thousands in them, marked stones, and a documentation centre that sets out plainly what happened and to whom. It is not a detour from the heath. It is part of what the heath is.

Away from the memorial the region is resolutely gentle. Villages gather around Low Saxon farmhouses whose vast thatched roofs sweep down over brick and timber framing. Celle keeps a ducal palace in Renaissance and Baroque dress and street after street of timber-framed houses; Lüneburg's old town came through the war largely unscathed and is still dominated by Brick Gothic in improbable colours, with a medieval crane standing on the old quayside. The E6 long-distance path crosses the region, and the cycling is excellent because the ground barely rises. Local kitchens run to Heidschnucke mutton, wild boar, asparagus when it comes in around May, and Buchweizentorte, a buckwheat cake with cranberry cream. The distilleries are less gentle: Ratzeputz, a ginger liqueur from Celle, and Heidegeist, a minty spirit at fifty per cent, sold in bottles small enough to constitute a warning.