The forts ring Amsterdam so if you travel about 15km out from the centre you will be pretty close to one of them.

After a recommendation from Els we headed out to Muiden. There are two forts here as well as a ferry link to a third at Pampus. We first stopped at the Muiden fort near the lock at the centre of town. Having looked at the forts in aerial photos this was the classic shape of the majority of the forts, it is a sort of arrowhead shape surrounded by a moat. We had a look inside but most of the things were closed, there was information leaflets about the other forts along the New Holland Waterline (on the Dutch tentative list).

We then walked out to the West battery (pictured), here you could get a better overview of the fort and its ring of water, it is now used as a meeting place for scouts. It was very hot so we went to the extremely small beach behind the battery and relaxed with the locals, looking out towards the fortress island of Pampus.

Muiden was an exceedingly charming place to visit and the castle is very impressive, we had a lovely time here sitting in the café next to the lock watching the boats move past. It was worth making the short trip out, there are hourly buses to and from Amsterdam Amstelstation and it takes about 30 minutes.

We saw three of the forts at Beemster, the one at Spijkerboor is open to visitors and has explanations about how the forts work, it was closed when we got there though. When you are taking off/landing at Schiphol keep an eye out as a fair few of the sites are located almost literally at the ends of the runways, I managed to see two more like this.

It is quite hard to grasp entirely how these forts work, and as they are so disparate I never really got a full sense of their worth. The engineering is impressive and it is a distinctly Dutch interpretation of defence. As a casual tourist I wouldn’t suggest the sites themselves are really worth trekking out to see but are wide spread so a visit to many places just outside Amsterdam should give you a chance to view at least one of them.