Hellendoorn, Haarle, Luttenberg

The Dutch countryside groans and creaks at the seams. Agriculture calls the shots there and has taken on an industrial character. Wherever you look, no square metre remains unused. Monocultures of profitable crops in a bare and efficiently designed landscape, tidy and raked. Tight, tighter, tightest. Mega-stables where pigs and chickens barely get out, or not at all. 'Pimped' dairy cows in pastures, big and pint-sized, by the intervention of the Americans. All focused on production, profit, time-saving, clarity and order.

That is the Netherlands in the twenty-first century, whichever way you look at it.

Once it was different. Certainly in Overijssel and not least in Twente and Salland. These regions, which are quite similar, traditionally had a small-scale form of agriculture. Also focused on efficiency, certainly. That is peculiar to the farmer. But small-scale was really small-scale. The average farmer had a mixed farm, with all kinds of activities that may have seemed fragmented, but were seamlessly connected. A field of rye here, a stable with some cows and pigs there, a beehive in the yard, some fruit trees, and so on. Whatever the farmer didn't grow, breed or cultivate himself, his neighbour probably did. With this neighbour he was best friends, entirely according to the rules of 'naoberschap'. The latter concept still exists in the Lower Saxon parts of Gelderland, Overijssel, Drenthe and Groningen. It simply means: looking after each other.

That is what people did in rural Twente and Salland. What is called: people depended strongly on each other. If the skipper of the 'zomp' didn't come home, the vicar couldn't move his furniture and the cane cutter couldn't get his woods to the customer in time. Zomp? Yes, a special vessel for the shallow rivers and streams that have cut through Overijssel since time immemorial, such as the Regge and Schipbeek. Incidentally, this delay could also occur when the water was too low or the course of the stream had shifted. Man wills, nature disposes. Or God, especially in those days.

The rural population acquiesced to this, for centuries. The farmers, the landowners, their families, the clergy: everyone took care of each other. Man had a gentle grip on the landscape, which can be seen on old maps. These show the proverbial patchwork quilt of fields, pastures, heathland for sheep, the 'onlands' of the marshlands and small hamlets, villages and towns that rub together.

Snug and cosy, on the face of it. Of course, this is an illusion - hunger and want often enough occurred. And man simply wants more, if at all possible. In the course of the twentieth century, changes began to take on real proportions. Think of land consolidation, a term that sounds innocent enough. The consequences were not. All the scattered plots belonging to this or that farmer scattered here and there on that variegated patchwork were exchanged and merged into large patches of land belonging to one or a few owners. There was no longer any need for traditional partitions in the form of wooded banks and hedges, especially after the advent of barbed wire. That cut it, especially for plant and animal life.

There was European cooperation, there were quotas, there was a flood of rules and regulations. The country changed, the people changed. The world changes, constantly.

Tight, tighter, tightest.

Now don't think there is nothing left to do in the Overijssel countryside. Yes, that supposed idyll of the past has disappeared. The farmer of today is undoubtedly doing his best, let us not doubt that. Indeed, here and there we see a small-scale farm business popping up again, even if it is often combined with a campsite or meeting room.

Don't forget that here we cycle through the land of the moraines, those overgrown hills from the ice ages. The land of the Regge, which eats hungrily through all kinds of meadows and woodlands. We take a tour that includes a clog workshop, an old-fashioned 'erve' and an agricultural museum. So keep that agricultural past coming.


This Premium cycling route was compiled by our editor: Matthijs Termeer