18 years after my first visit, I made the most of being based in the Netherlands for the summer to try to understand this somewhat enigmatic site.

But where to choose? Well quite by accident I hit a jackpot.

The Waterlinie Museum

This fantastic museum just outside Utrecht focuses on the New Dutch Waterline section that runs from Muiden on the Ijmeer, south to the Waal (essentially the Rhine) river at Gorinchem. The elegant concrete brutalist bunker has been inserted into the centre of the original fort, and its central courtyard now has a beautiful concrete 3D map of the whole system that can be filled with water to fully illustrate how water defence system can be used to flood a band across the central Netherlands to protect Holland and Amsterdam from attaches from the South and East.

The museum has interactive screens and models that are partially aimed at children, but for the first time explained to me the system and how it works, in a way that finally got it beyond just a theoretical, “I think I understand it”.

Perhaps the highlight of the museum though was the VR experience that simulated a flight over the top of the whole defence system, allowing you to pick out the features of the landscape that are part of the defences or the fields that would end up inundated. It may sound slightly tacky, but this was actually the best example of a VR experience in a museum that I have encountered. It enabled me to properly visualise the whole network, and see it in action. It was also so much fun that my 7 year old went on it twice, so well done to the exhibition designers.

This museum also has the benefit of having a mildly tangible component of the Lower German Limes next to it, though as ever that site presents little more than some scrubland with outlines where some roman walls are buried.

Cult classic

If you are visiting this museum then I can thoroughly recommend stopping at Restaurant Vroeg not just because it's bakery has lots of delicious treats (we bookended our summer long stay in the Netherlands with Boterkoek and Cinnamon and Chocolate tarts from here) but because thanks to some fastidious map reading by Jasam the car park has something of a cult status for World Heritage Site nerds. This rather uninspiring place is actually inscribed twice on the World Heritage list, as part of the Dutch Water Defences and the Lower German Limes.

You can stand in this mildly scruffy patch of gravel and grass and proclaim that it is twice as important as the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China or Versailles or the Grand Canyon and to some extent be accurate.