I must admit that I was not really looking forward to this visit; it is by its very essence featureless, just flat and featureless. However I actually quite enjoyed the few hours I spent driving around and having a walk. It was the one site where I could grasp the Dutch water management system that seems to dominate their inscriptions.

There is no real monument or place where you can ‘see’ this site; you just have to lose yourself on the very straight roads overlooking the fields. One aspect that didn’t really occur to until I looked out at the landscape, but in Britain and most other places I have visited farms are all bounded by fences or hedge rows, but here it was drainage ditches that stopped the cows from wandering off, it is not really such an exciting point but I just found that quite interesting, and it gave the countryside quite a distinctive character.

I visited the town of Middenbeemster, it looked a lot like a very well presented ‘small town America’ however I was corrected on this, small town America looks a lot like this! The rigid grid layout of the roads was exported to the new world; Beemster even has a claim to being the model that the street plan of New York is based on. Middenbeemster was quite a nice place and had a few small museums, traditional farmhouses (picture) and a very friendly and helpful tourist information centre.

There is a dike that runs around the edge of the polder and from here you can really appreciate the difference in the levels of the surrounding lands and the polder itself. Also along the southern parts of the dike are three of the forts from the ‘Defensive Lines of Amsterdam’ WHS, the one at Spijkerboor is normally open to visitors but was closed when we visited but we had a little walk around it, and held a celebration for seeing the lesser spotted UNESCO site in a UNESCO site.

This site is not going to be the highlight of most peoples time in the Netherlands, but the good weather and empty roads made this a nice place for me to appreciate the Dutch ‘struggle against water’