Terps, borgs and the pink granite coast: Windmills, water and wood

Heading slowly north we came to Zaanse Shanz, a brilliant reconstructed historical folk village and museum with a series of working windmills on a picturesque canal, drying chalk, squeezing oils, honey and mustard and pumping water, as we watched.

Historical traditional homes had been moved here from all parts of the Netherlands, many clothed in wood. They needed to be light to stand on top of the earth that was essentially soft, sinking peat. Had they been stone they would likely have sunk. Typically, they are painted a shiny green and many on the site have ornamental gables and facades picked out in black and white. Folksy and charming.

Here, we spent time in a Klompen (clog) factory watching demonstrations of how clogs are made and we saw Albert Heijn's first store, and found folk tales and traditional information dotting the site aplenty. An excellent site.

We had lunch at a very ugly place, Wyck aan Zee, on top of a massive wave of sand dunes that kept the sea from the land. The highest of these rose to about 20 metres above sea level. We parked overlooking a sandy beach that stretched for miles on the sea side but as we looked landwards there lay a huge monster of a steel factory belching white smoke out of a cluster of a dozen fuming chimneys.

Question then is: is smoke that thick and white that spews over the countryside any less a pollutant than thick, dark smoke?

Question: The water is ice blue. Layers of waves roll in looking ice white. The sand is golden and bare: not even a footprint. The wind today is frigid, ripping straight off the top of an Arctic ice floe. If this is May, when can anyone ever swim here? And if ever they could, would they want to with a monster breathing heavily at their backs?

We headed then to Jisp, which long ago was a whaling village, but now seems too far inland to have made that even possible. Here, 17th century biscuit makers lived in the front part of little houses made of wood that sit lightly on this landscape surrounded everywhere by water. Their ovens were built to fit into the back of the house. They moulded their dough, shaped and baked it, then took the biscuits they made by lake and canal to sell in the Amsterdam markets.

On then to Beemster, which now is a delightful village, but four hundred years ago was a lake. A smart engineer in the early decades of the 1600's dreamed up a way to claw back land from the sea. He drained the lake on and off for about three years using some forty drainage mills pumping the water over the top of a dike into a ring canal, and from there, draining the excess water away.

In doing so he created the Netherland's very first polder: a fertile tract of dry land rescued from the sea, and on that polder local folk started to lay bricks, and today many of their homes still survive, straight out of the pages of a 17th century how-to book on architecture. So unusual is Beemster that it has been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Question: Why do four hundred year old Dutch homes look like they were built yesterday? Even the mortar looks fresh, clean and new. In England homes of this age would be held up with strengthening iron cross bars for support; be twisted with age into crooked little houses that creak if you look at them: nothing at all so neat, or trim, or all in a pretty row.

A local Beemster resident saw us wandering her town, came up to us, interrupting her own busy day to give us a long and incredibly interesting talk about the polder. This year marks the 400 year birthday celebration of the town's beginnings and the locals are proud of their beautiful town. They have posted illustrated information boards over important sites and have decorated it with streamers and banners. The town attracts tourists and the locals volunteer to offer them information. Along with tourism the town makes money from its cheeses: today the polder region produces some of the finest cheeses made in the Netherlands.

She told us Beemster lies 4 metres below sea level, yet it has never once flooded in her lifetime.

And she is not scared.

She trusts the dikes that protect her home, her town, and her livelihood.