Eleven and a half kilometres across the Barycz lowlands, from Nowe Grodzisko west to the Maltzan Palace at Milicz. The elevation never varies by more than eighteen metres from end to end — this is a route measured in speed and scenery, not in metres climbed.

There's a gentle lift in the first kilometre and a longer, easier rise around the halfway mark, neither steep enough to break rhythm. Everything else is open, level riding — and what it's level across is the reason to come.

This is the country of the Stawy Milickie, the Milicz Ponds: the largest complex of fish ponds in Europe, dug by Cistercian monks in the thirteenth century and worked for carp ever since. Some seven thousand hectares of shallow water lie scattered through alder carr and wet meadow, held by low earth dykes that the roads run along — so for much of the route there is water on both sides of you, flat as glass. The finish is at the palace itself, a classicist house of the 1790s set in its own English park on the edge of town, with the ruins of the older castle nearby.

The surface of this route is mostly dirt and gravel.