Eliot's Travels

Having spent Saturday at Landal, we decided it would be fun to get out to the countryside. So we decided on National Park De Weerribben north of Zwolle. We traveled along N50 to Kampen and over to Ossenzijl at the north end of the park where the visitor's center was located. In route, we saw lots of crop fields - onions/garlic, potatoes (everywhere), rutabaga/beet or some other root veggie with a dark green top, wheat, corn. There also seems to be a fetish with miniature horses in this area, as we saw lots of fields with them. We also saw large farmhouses with modern-looking, tin-roofed milking barns attached to the house or very nearby. These farmsteads all seemed to be named (maybe for the dairy?) and had beautiful thatched roofs, painted shutters, and brick walls. In the fields plenty of Holsteins grazed, some very full of milk. We were about to see where the thatch came from!

We got to to De Weerribben about 11:00. Since boys were asleep, Jim, John and Mary went to check out the canoe rentals, while I stayed with the boys. Apparently, the way to see the park is via canoe - that's the only way to get around the marshland as there are very few bridges within the park. The canoes were sold out at the visitors center, so they sent us to a resort nearby. Mary found a picnic spot by the visitors center where we ate our picnic lunch we brought. Eliot and I made a quick run through the visitor's center to see the animals we were to look for in the park: otters, beaver rats, fish, eels, and birds.


In the north-west region of Overijssel lies a scenic and wildlife area called De Weerribben. Water and reed dominate its landscape. The park consists of 3500 hectares of marshy land. This entire area was worked by peat and reed harvesters; jobs among the hardest imaginable. The environmental diversity inclues water, reed-land, hay land and carr woodland.

As far back as the Middle Ages, it was already common knowledge that dredged and dried peat could be used for fuel. This is what is called turf. So for centuries, peat digging was the main livelinood of the region. The peat was doug out in longcourses along which narrow strips of land were left standing on which the peat coule be left to dry. These strips of land are called legakkers (drying fields) or ribben (levees). Levees 3 m wide were divided by turf ponds of up to 30 m. The weer (turf pond) is the excavated land that subsequently flooded with water.

Peat-digging continued until 1920 in this region when it was no longer profitable to extract it. The local population switched to reed-cutting. Because rootstock and roots of plants intertwine under water, larger floating hover (vegetation) can develop which eventually becmes thick enough to walk on. This hay land and the levees between the reed-lands are cut in the summer, as opposed to teh reed-land that is reaped in winter. If no active management were in place for the various landscapes, a large part of the Weerribben would eventually develop into land and subsequently carr woodland.

We saw lots of people out on the water usually in electric boats, though there were some people in canoes and one kayaker. The landscape was quite strange - with woods, reeds, grasses, lily pads - all seen from the water level. It was really hard to tell what was solid. We saw farm equipment (tractor and a bailer) brought in by barge to a hay land. We saw a few bundles of reeds on the shore. Some canals were heavily grown over; the worked ones were about 3 m.

posted by Whitney @ 8:25 PM