The Beemster Polder

The Beemster was a lake until Amsterdam merchants paid to have it pumped out with windmills, and by 1612 it was dry farmland. What makes it a World Heritage site is not the drainage but the plan drawn on the empty bed afterwards: a grid of square blocks ruled out with straight roads, ditches and rows of trees, with farmhouses set back on their own plots. Four centuries later the pattern is still legible from any road, and the farms sit several metres below sea level behind their dykes. It is quiet, agricultural and completely flat, and it reads as an idea about land as much as a landscape.

What you actually see

• The grid - straight roads and ditches meeting at right angles across the whole polder.
• Middenbeemster - the small central village with its church at the crossing point of the plan.
• The ring dyke and canal - the raised border that holds the polder and carries a road around it.
• The farmsteads - large working farms set back behind their own approach and planting.

When to go

Late spring and summer, when the fields are green and the trees in leaf, and preferably by bicycle, since the point of the place is only visible from inside it. Early morning gives long light down the road lines. Winter here is bare, windy and grey, and there is almost no shelter anywhere in the polder.

Honest expectations

There is no single sight and nothing to enter, so people who arrive expecting a monument find farmland and leave puzzled. Distances between anything of interest are long and every road is exposed. Farm traffic uses the same narrow lanes as cyclists. Without a map and the story, it looks like ordinary countryside.

Nearby

Purmerend and the old town of De Rijp, with Zaanse Schans to the southwest.