Terps, borgs and the pink granite coast: Lovely Leiden

In olden times when there were few roads and where two rivers met small boats tended to gather; the occupants would bump alongside each other and chat.

Sometimes as they chatted someone would pass around a platter of food. So produce became important at these gatherings. As other boats moored there was more to share. Soon produce was being bought and sold from the boats.

A river market, on board these boats, grew into existence.

A weighing station just to the side of the canal was eventually built and produce from the boats was weighed out and sold to passersby. No traditional market square seemed needed, and thus the pretty canal market town of Leiden came into existence.

Over time the market folk built houses along the canal and the town grew and bustled around the waterways. A town that stoically withstood a long term siege from invading Spanish for such a long time that William of Orange, as thanks to the community, offered the townsfolk of Leiden either a university or a reduction in taxes.

They chose the university. Then over more time Leiden became home to those who valued liberal thinking and freedom. Religious pilgrims such as the English Puritans under John Robinson in the 15th Century found a safe haven in Leiden. These same puritans, thirty seven of them, eventually set sail on the Mayflower against all odds to found a new home on new shores in a New World, taking many Dutch notions with them: such as Dutch ideas about celebrations that eventually were incorporated into a harvest festival to become Thanksgiving; along with the singularly Dutch invention: civil marriage.

Today, university students give Leiden an appealing energy. They cycle to tutorials along the canal streets with their cloth knapsacks holding textbooks and papers, or chat intensely in small clusters in cafes on the cobbles overlooked by charming homes, some dating as far back as the 16th century with their collection of fascinating gables that arch or swirl or curl with decoration.

These gables were built as facades to disguise the steeply pitched roofs behind which lie useful storage space. So high are some of these that owners of canal houses often built the top of their three floor homes with the top floor leaning forwards, to help prevent winched loads of supplies heading for the attic from banging into the floors beneath.

Little crooked houses, so charming still.