Giants’ Beds, Pretty Villages, Books and a Battle

Friday 08 – Tuesday 12 April 2022

We were now in the Drenthe area of the Netherlands, which we found had much more interesting and varied scenery than the “watery” parts of the Netherlands we’d been travelling through previously.

Drenth is known as the home of the Netherlands’ megaliths. Called “hunebedden” (giants’ beds) in Dutch, these are dolmens built by the Funnel Beaker people around 5,000 years ago.

We did a tour of some of the more accessible of the 54 hunebedden on Friday, starting in Borger where we’d spent Thursday night.

D28 and D29, which are next to the main road on the outskirts of Borger:

D27, the biggest of the surviving hunebedden at 22.6m long, situated at the Hunebed Centre in Borger:

It’s clear that these hunebedden have been significantly “tidied up”. Compare what D27 looked like around 1900:

We didn’t go into the Hunebed Centre, a) having seen quite a few museum exhibits of this type in the past, and b) what we could see suggesting that it might be aimed more at kids. We liked the mammoths near the car park though:

We found D17 and D18 near the medieval church in the village of Rolde:

D15 was in an isolated spot just outside the village of Loon:

Finally, D53 and D54 near Havelte:

Phew! At the end of our day of hunebed-hunting, we had a short 20 minute drive to the town of Gietshoorn, which our guide book assures us is a contender for the prettiest village in the Netherlands.

Overnight: Camperplaats Haamstede, Giethoorn (08 April)

Oh no – I forgot to take a photo. Doh! We spent the night at a really nice little camper place on the outskirts of Giethoorn.

Next morning, we moved SOK to the free town parking (of which there is plenty) and set off to explore. Giethoorn did live up to the description in the guide book in terms of prettiness.

It’s basically a one-footpath village along the side of a canal:

The bridges are private bridges across to people’s houses on the other side of the canal. Most had little gates or signs marking them as private, but some were tourist attractions (generally workshops / shops selling pottery etc) so their bridges were fair game.

The village was founded in the 13th century by flagellants escaping persecution in Southern Europe for their somewhat unusual practices. Then in the 16th century the village was settled by Mennonites. The Mennonite church is still there, but in all other respects Giethoorn seemed reassuringly normal.

We guessed that Giethoorn must be tourist-central in the main season due to the preponderance of tourist-oriented shops and the sheer number of rental boats on offer.

The weather was a mix of sunny spells and short-lived but heavy downpours.

I’m sure this family thought that a boat trip round the canals made great sense whilst the sun was shining! You need to mentally add ear-piercing shrieks from a small child hidden under the umbrellas for full effect:

As we were leaving, the big tourist boats were starting to tout for business:

It must be absolute pandemonium on those canals at times in the summer! We did see one boat side-on in the canal, with the German chap driving explaining loudly to his family that with them in front of him, he couldn’t actually see where he was going.

From Giethoorn, we drove about an hour and a half south to the small city of Zutphen. We got tickets for what we’d come to see, then had a wander round the historic centre.

It was really nice – not overtly touristy but with plenty to look at; a market selling a wide range of foodstuffs, small shops selling all kinds of interesting things, and sections of medieval wall to look at.

At 3.30pm we headed to the Walburgiskerk, which gave us time to do the half an hour audio tour of the church itself that was included with our tickets:

The original church was built in the 11th century and reconstructed in the 13th century, with “bits” added in later centuries in the usual way.

The “bit” we had come to see was the library, built between 1561 and 1564, partly because the church’s collection of books was getting too big for the existing library and partly as part of the fight against the Reformation. One of the two church elders behind the building of the library wrote that “if people read the right books, they would be cured of their errors and become true believers of the Christian faith” (wording from the information leaflet).

Access to the library is only possible with a guided tour, which cost €9 each. The Zutphen Library was built as a public library; for about 30 years in the late 16th century, residents of Zutphen could trot into the library to read the books. Oh what joy….

The Zutphen Library is apparently one of only five original chained libraries remaining in the World (original meaning that it has the original books and the original furniture; many other chained libraries lost books during the Reformation, for example). We’ve visited the chained libraries at Hereford Cathedral (another of the originals) and Wells Cathedral. Zutphen Library is more attractive in that the books are chained to the reading desks rather than chained on shelves, so the books don’t look quite so much like miserable captives.

The Library has about 750 books on a wide range of topics, many of which were bequeathed to the Library by citizens of Zutphen in the 15th and 16th centuries; in addition to the usual religious and legal texts, they have books on nature and science, for example.

A couple of books were open in a case to give an idea of what some of the collection looks like. Is this the most lovely little book ever?

It’s a grammar book printed in the 1520s and later annotated in very tiny writing by a student who has also taken the time to draw a few ducks / geese around the page. Fascinating stuff if you’re a book lover!

Overnight: Zutphen Car Park (09 April)

We spend Saturday night on a great little car park near the centre of Zutphen. It cost us €12.70 to park for 24 hours, and the noise from the geese, ducks etc during the night came for free. “I wonder if they’re the duckscendents of the ducks in that book?” mumbled Mark at one point.

Sunday’s main destination was the Airborne Museum Hartenstein in Osterbeek on the outskirts of Arnhem. This tells the story of the Battle of Arnhem in September 1944. It’s sobering stuff.

We thought that the museum was excellent, with plenty of information and all very well presented.

They’ve clearly spent a lot of money down in the basement, where you get an “experience” that the signs say is not for children under eight.

You start off by going through a door into a glider ready for take-off. It does move, so you get the impression of take-off, the glider being released, and then landing. It was very dark in there; the photo is with flash (ten people can go through at once but luckily we were on our own):

All good fun but when you leave the glider and make your way through the various stages of the battle, it gets a lot more grim. It’s quite dark and there is lots of noise (mainly gunshots). Definitely not suitable for very small children.

After leaving the museum, our plan had been to head to the town of Wageningen where there was a Revolution Laundry (one of the set-ups you see in supermarket car parks and on garage forecourts).

A total failure – we had to wait for the machine to become free, put out stuff in, then discovered that it wouldn’t accept any of our payment cards, despite the machine clearly showing both Visa and Mastercard logos (there was no option to use cash; it was card only). So our washing was loaded back into the van, still mucky.

Overnight: Jachthaven de Wies, Heusden (10 Apr)

Interestingly, my cards refused to work yet again when we reached the site we were planning to stay the night on. We’d had no trouble at the Airborne Museum earlier in the day.

Not being able to pay at the camper site was a bit of a problem as it’s unmanned and you need to pay at what is effectively a car park machine to get a code which will enable you to open the barrier to get in. No code = no way in.

Luckily, there was an option to pay using the AanUit app, which quite a few motorhome places in the Netherlands now seem to use either for parking fees or to charge for metered electricity. I’d downloaded it a few days previously so as to ensure I was all set up in case we needed it. Phew. The app will supposedly invoice me by email at some point. Whether or not it’ll accept my card to pay the bill is another matter!

By this point I was getting very intrigued by all this card kerfuffle in the Netherlands, so I looked it up. Right’o. The default card type is Maestro; Visa and Mastercard are iffy, particularly at “non-tourist” locations. There doesn’t seem to be any way round it; just carry plenty of cash as a back-up in case our UK cards don’t work. It does feel very strange in the modern age to be having to resort to waving cash again.

Anyway, the site at Heusden was brand new.

It’s nowhere near peak prettiness yet given that the grass is still patchy, but there’s a great view of occasional barges going up and down the river in one direction and the edge of the fortifications and a windmill in the other direction.

We were on the green “hook” of land on the far left of the photo above (taken before the camper parking was installed).

Monday morning was spent exploring Heusden. It’s bigger than Bourtange (see our previous post) and feels more like a town than “just” a tourist attraction, although it clearly does get lots of visitors.

Monday afternoon’s task was to have another go at getting our washing done en route to our next overnight stop, which was a couple of hours’ drive away.

Laundry: Wassalon Was(t)goed, Tessenderlo

Success! We’d had to cross back into Belgium to achieve clean washing. For some reason, Google seems to come up with plenty of launderettes in Belgium but not in the Netherlands. This one was in a small town with parking outside, and one of the reviews said you could pay by cash or card, which seemed a good idea given our recent card troubles.

It was a really nice launderette, clean and modern. Our stocks of clean socks replenished, we moved on to our overnight stop.

Overnight: Park Olmenhof, Herk-de-Stad (11 April)

Another thing we’ve noticed is that there’s a lot more free motorhome parking in Belgium than there is in the Netherlands (We didn’t have a single free night in the Netherlands). Here we had free motorhome parking for 6 vans on the edge of a park.

Tuesday’s destination was the Battle of Waterloo Memorial, just South of Brussels.

The rotunda on the left of the photo contains a huge painting of the battlefield which covers the entirety of the interior walls and dates back to the 1820s. Apparently such rotundas were popular at one time and this is a rare survival.

The Lion’s Mount to the right of the photo was erected in 1826 to commemorate the spot where the Prince of Orange was wounded during the battle. The lion on top is supposed to symbolise the victory of the monarchies. From the top you get a good view of the battlefield area.

There’s also a very modern museum underneath the grassy area in the foreground of the photo above. Much of it involves an audio guide commentary linked to images on the walls of paintings of various aspects of Napoleonic Wars and then the Battle of Waterloo. There were also displays of the types of uniforms that would have been worn and the weapons that would have been used in the battle.

A 15 minute “4D” film (which involved donning 3D glasses) finally gave us a “blow by blow” account of the battle itself.

Overnight: Le Rouelx (12 April)

We drove about half an hour from Waterloo to our stop for the night by the Canal du Midi.

You can see our next tourist destination in the background: the Strépy-Thieu Boat Lift.

That’s all for now. Further updates to follow!