Dark corners of Drenthe: from old prison cruelty to Stone Age tombs

Cycling to Drenthe’s hunebedden and the Veenhuizen forced labor colony

Drenthe is quite empty compared to the rest of the Netherlands: no major cities, the lowest population in the country, and not a hotspot for career hunters. For an adventure, though, you couldn’t ask for a better place. We actually started just outside of it, in Groningen — the north’s only real urban hub, which everyone around here calls “The City” — and then crossed over.

The weather was mostly on our side with plenty of sun, but the clouds kept threatening to soak us the entire time.

We were heading to the village of Norg to see one of Drenthe’s prehistoric monuments, but first stumbled upon a place that looked almost alien amid all the greenery. This was UGS Norg, one of the largest seasonal gas storage facilities in Western Europe, but you cannot grasp its size from the surface. Instead of using metal tanks, it utilizes a natural gas field deep underground. We first imagined it as a colossal cavern, but in reality, the gas is held inside porous sandstone, acting as a gigantic sponge.

Funny how the quietest natural areas often hide such industrial giants.

After passing the UGS, we dove into the quiet canopy of the Norgerholt Forest. It’s a remarkably scenic area, with a few still pools of water where trunks rise straight out of their mirror surface.

I try to enjoy this bright spring green while it lasts.

We could literally feel the age of the Norgerholt as we rode through. It’s one of the oldest protected woodlands in the country, possibly dating back to the 9th century.

These forest ponds can have completely different backstories: some are 10,000-year-old craters left by a melted glacier, while medieval farmers dug others as watering holes for their cows.

And then we reached our first dolmen — or “hunebed,” as they’re called in Dutch — a Stone Age monument built for collective burials. Today, we only see the bare “skeletons” of these structures. Originally, they were completely covered with earth to look like grassy hills.

Our first ever dolmen! I’m glad it was small, because it meant we could be impressed all over again when we saw the bigger ones later on.

The dolmen D2 sits east of the village of Westervelde in a peaceful spot right next to farmhouses. It’s fairly modest — about eight by three meters — and only two of its four original capstones still rest on the roof. Before these tombs were legally protected, locals would drill holes into the boulders, pack them with gunpowder, and blast them apart for road pavement or construction. The fractured chunk lying inside the chamber is a permanent scar from those demolition attempts.

We weren’t the only people wandering around the site on a gorgeous day like this, so I had to hurry up with our self-portrait.

At that point, we had to choose: keep hunting for other dolmens, or head off-route to explore Drenthe’s prison history. Knowing we had two full days left to find more stones, we decided to check out the National Prison Museum in Veenhuizen. This horrifying place began in the 1800s as a forced-labor colony for orphans, beggars, and the poor, eventually evolving into a high-security state prison.

It’s tough to reconcile how dark a prison is when it’s surrounded by such incredible greenery.

The village of Veenhuizen itself was essentially an entire colony back then, featuring dozens of buildings to house the prisoners and the guards who watched them. The museum is set up inside the oldest standing structure, called the Second Institution (or “Tweede Gesticht” in Dutch). It’s built in a rigid square, sealing off a courtyard inside.

A sunny entrance that doesn’t prepare visitors for what’s inside.

The Second Institution was the most notorious spot. It isolated orphans and beggars from the rest of society and forced them into hard agricultural labor to “cure” their poverty. Thousands of children were sent to this square block just for the crime of being poor and alone.

Something seems off about this peaceful view at first, and then you spot the bars on all the windows.

The museum tracks several centuries of crime and punishment, so we had to look closely to separate the artifacts tied to the colony’s own history from those that simply showed the general cruelty of the past. For example, we came across a sinister 17th-century execution cross. Executioners used it to shatter a criminal’s bones with a heavy iron bar before hoisting the broken body onto a high wheel to die. This practice had been outlawed before the Veenhuizen colony was established.

Being broken on this cross was a dishonorable death sentence, reserved strictly for the most violent robbers, arsonists, and murderers. If the judges granted “mercy,” the executioner delivered a lethal strike to the chest. Otherwise, the mangled body was left exposed to be eaten by birds.

But the next exhibit — a row of hammocks strung up against the windows — had a direct connection to the colony. In the 1800s, hundreds of orphans slept packed together in these open halls. The windows offered no escape, only a direct view into the courtyard where guards carried out brutal public punishments.

Children were forced to watch them as colony directors believed in visible deterrence: “Look, this is what happens if you break the rules.”

Next, we came across a row of bizarre iron cages called “slaapkooien.” When the state took over Veenhuizen and turned it into a prison, the open sleeping halls became a real security headache for the guards, so they constructed these cages. Every evening, they would lock each inmate inside a cage equipped with nothing but a hammock and a toilet pot.

The state ignored protests over these inhumane conditions and kept using the cages until the 1960s.

We left the museum in a heavy mood, and as we rode through Veenhuizen, the dark history followed us onto the streets. I noticed bold inscriptions carved onto the facades of the residential houses; for instance, one read “Werk en Bid” (“Work and Pray”).

Colony inmates couldn’t even walk to a grueling day of forced labor without getting a lecture on discipline.

Colony directors placed these slogans on the staff houses lining the main roads. As inmates marched from their dormitories to the surrounding peat bogs and heather fields to farm the land, the very architecture demanded obedience.

“Humaniteit” is carved in a place with such an inhumane history.

Then we rode to the Esmeer Lake. The landscape here was stunning; what used to be farmland turned into juicy meadows.

When nature sets the color saturation to maximum.

Locals know it as a prime spot for crane-watching. We didn’t bring heavy-duty binoculars, but after Veenhuizen, just standing in an open field with nothing fencing us in felt like plenty.

We didn’t spot any cranes that day, but it’s easy to see why they’d love a place like this.

I headed up the viewing tower to check out the panoramic view from above. Meanwhile, Oksanka remembered the thermos in our bag, so we took a break for some tea and sweets.

Clouds painting patterns of light and shadow across the meadows.

I looked at my watch and realized that despite the warm sunlight, it was getting late. We could have explored several more spots, but decided to go straight to our B&B near Assen and get some proper rest before another day of cycling.

A classic piece of Dutch farming infrastructure. This tank holds cow manure over the winter months to protect the local groundwater.

When we finally arrived, it turned out to be an adorable little “esdorp,” or traditional farming village, called Loon. Several of these historic settlements sit within the Drentsche Aa National Park. The old longhouses here have thatched gabled roofs that stretch almost to the ground.

The view from our lovely B&B. At first, I regretted missing out on using such perfect photo light, but the need for a good sleep won.

We really wanted to drop our things and go explore the village, but after a hefty dinner, we just gave up and went straight to bed. Before dozing off, I almost unconsciously set my alarm for 5 a.m., hoping I’d get enough sleep to wake up that early.

Dolmen hunting at sunrise: the hunebedden of the Drentsche Aa National Park

Did I wake up before sunrise? Well, you already know. Oksanka just mumbled something from under the covers, so I left her in bed and slipped out to satisfy my photo craving before breakfast.

A fiery sunrise piercing the early morning darkness.

I rode straight to dolmen D15, which was just minutes away. It hid in deep tree shadows while the sunrise was cutting in from behind. It felt way more intact than the one from yesterday. When legendary Dutch archaeologist and “Father of the Dolmens” Albert van Giffen got here in 1920, the tomb was a total mess; its capstones had slipped off and were just sitting on the floor. He managed to hoist the whole structure back together, lifting those giant boulders back onto their supports.

In a few hours, I’d be looking at a painting of this dolmen in a museum—but for now, I was standing right in front of it, enjoying the solitude.

Meanwhile, the sky was turning a striped pink-violet, painted with high-altitude cirrus clouds that looked like feathers or horse tails.

Every couple of minutes, the sky shifted its colors and cloud formations like a giant slideshow.

Nature started waking up with the sun. I met a sheep who stared at me, probably trying to process what the heck I was doing out there. It had a very intelligent face and an unusually long tail.

A morning hello from a Drenthe heath sheep, Western Europe’s oldest breed, roaming the region since the Stone Age.

Then I spotted a real “stork hotel” among the trees — a row of tall poles topped with massive nests. One stork was busy feeding its chicks up there. Judging by the sheer height of the nest, the couple must have been returning to this exact spot for years, adding fresh layers every spring.

These artificial pole nests helped rescue the Dutch stork from near-extinction in the 1970s.

A low morning mist was rolling in, turning the ground white in the distance. The grass perfectly reflected in the still creeks, and the air was filled with nothing but birdsong.

I was hoping for a much thicker mist, but it was dissolving really fast.

The scenery around me shifted from open fields to meadows and then to the shrubby dunes.

Yellow irises blooming along the water’s edge, surrounded by dew-soaked horsetails.

Next up was dolmen D10, located out in the Gasterse Duinen. This nature reserve is a gorgeous stretch of rolling heathland covered in grayish shrubs and solitary trees.

Looking out across the heather carpet of the Gasterse Duinen.

The dolmen itself was tiny and clearly missing many pieces. Van Giffen excavated the site in 1921 and uncovered a whole treasure trove of clay pottery. Most of these artifacts come from the Funnelbeaker culture that stretched across modern Denmark, the Netherlands, northern Germany, and Poland. This ancient society emerged in 4100 BCE — more than six thousand years ago!

Sand, heather, oaks, and six-thousand-year-old boulders.

I looked up and started worrying a bit about the weather. The day had barely started, but the clouds were already promising rain. The rain was still holding off, though, so I pedaled on confidently.

Riding straight into the rain is never fun, but a stormy sky never ceases to amaze me.

I left the fields and dunes behind, entering a thick woodland on my way to the massive dolmen D11, which sat in the middle of a wide clearing at the intersection of forest paths.

Young oak leaves framing the ancient stones of D11.

D11 was clearly missing a capstone, but it looked pretty intact otherwise. Later, I learned that it originally stood in open heathland, and that the thick forest around it was only planted in the 1920s for timber production.

Freshly cleared trees around the dolmen.

Not far from the dolmen were three burial mounds. The sun shone directly on them, making them an emerald green. Though often labeled as Iron Age (around 2,500 years ago), they are actually older — reused by one generation after another, spanning several prehistoric cultures.

One of the three ancient burial mounds in the forest near Anloo.

Unlike dolmens, these mounds were just small hills of earth and turf, built without stones. Depending on the era, they were used for either full-body burials or cremations.

Originally, these mounds didn’t have grass; ancient communities capped them with pale sand or dark turf.

Then, the landscape changed again. As I headed toward the other dolmens, I rode into a warm, steaming field.

Pink campions catching the morning light along the edge of the fields.

It was past 7 a.m., and I started seeing a few locals on their bikes heading out to start their day. We traded quick “Goedemorgen!” greetings.

A hiking area where animals roam completely free.

Since I didn’t know the area well, I accidentally ended up in a few hiking-only zones, so I hopped off and walked the bike. And honestly, it was a good thing I did! While the wild horses ignored me, I ran into a family of Highland cows with five calves, and I was glad to be on foot. The cows gave me a menacing look, so I just passed by at a steady pace, giving them no reason to start any trouble.

Friendly ponies sunbathing on a lawn.

But it wasn’t all tense encounters. I met adorable ponies lined up with their foals, almost like they were setting up for a photoshoot. The foals tried to hide behind their parents, but everyone was relaxed and didn’t seem to mind a curious two-legged intruder in a red helmet.

A soft rain started coming down; luckily, both the ponies and I were wearing waterproof layers.

After that, I arrived at a pair of dolmens — D17 and D18 — marking the first time I’d seen two together instead of a solitary monument. They stood in a beautiful rural area near Rolde, neighboring a village cemetery and the 14th-century church.

Separated only by a thin row of trees, a modern cemetery sits right next to this dolmen. Five millennia later, the same use.

D18 looked perfectly intact, with all seven of its capstones neatly in place, while its neighbor, D17, was a bit of a mess. D17 originally featured eight capstones, but most of them have slipped off their pillars or broken apart.

That crooked oak next to the dolmen was hollowed out by lightning years ago, then coated in tar and held together by iron rods. Still standing, though.

Believe it or not, these two played a real part in why the Netherlands protects prehistoric heritage today. In 1847, the local council put them up for sale to private buyers, and they were almost smashed up for building materials. It caused a national scandal until the government stepped in to buy them back, setting a precedent the state would lean on again later.

Peeking under the dolmen capstones. This was the ceiling of its burial chamber.

Since these prehistoric sites are next to old villages, people have been documenting them for centuries. The very first recorded name for a Dutch dolmen appears in a text from 1505 as “Des Duvels Kolse” (“The Devil’s Cunt”). While folklore long associated this nickname with the twin dolmens behind the Rolde church, modern research shows it belonged to D10, which I had seen an hour ago in the Gasterse Duinen.

The medieval village church of Rolde.

Did I feel I had seen enough dolmens? Of course, not. And the next one was just around the corner in the freshly plowed fields.

Freshly plowed earth and the dolmen silhouette under the trees in the distance.

D16 looked flawless, with all capstones and the side entrance, and stretching over fifteen meters. But here’s a catch. When Albert van Giffen first surveyed it in 1925, he literally described it as being in a “sad state,” as no one could guess the original layout. He went ahead and restored it anyway, so what we’re looking at now is basically one guy’s best guess.

I got to see it fully assembled, but the archeologists who found it weren’t nearly as lucky.

The sun stood high in the sky. Oksanka had woken up and was calling to check on me. But I was almost there, and we managed to walk downstairs right on time for breakfast.

The Drents Museum: bog bodies, the Girl of Yde, and the world’s oldest boat

Once we packed up our things, we rode toward the provincial capital, Assen, to visit the Drents Museum and dive even deeper into the prehistoric lore. The museum is famous for its bog bodies and ancient graves, for example, the tree-trunk burial of a Bronze Age woman cradling her child.

The first terrifying exhibit at the Drents Museum. Looking into the eyes of death and the fragility of human life.

We looked at old arrowheads, spears, metal ornaments, and stone tools. Some of those stone pieces weren’t just a few thousand years old, but date back tens of thousands of years!

Prehistoric humans shaped these stones into knives, axes, and scrapers.

In the painting gallery, I recognized the Loon dolmen, D15, which I’d stood right next to just a few hours earlier, before sunrise! Johan Dijkstra had captured it from a different angle, though, leaving out the trees in the background.

A room filled with dolmen paintings from across the centuries.

Walking through the maze of exhibition rooms, we came up to one of Drenthe’s biggest treasures, a dugout canoe that’s widely considered the oldest boat in the world. Carbon dating places it in the early Mesolithic period, around 8000 BCE, making it roughly ten thousand years old. That means it predates Stonehenge, the Egyptian pyramids, and even Drenthe’s dolmens!

An old log? No, you’re looking at the oldest wooden boat on earth.

The boat was carved out of a single pine log. Frankly, looking at the heavily damaged timber, it was tough to see how it ever functioned as a boat, but a nearby interactive model really brought it to life.

Oksanka tries to paddle a replica of a dugout boat while I’m capturing the actual ancient artifact.

The second of the two museum’s biggest highlights was the Girl of Yde, an incredibly preserved bog body of a 16-year-old girl who lived during the Iron Age, around the 1st century AD. She was found with a wool rope wrapped three times around her neck and half of her hair shaved off, hinting at a ritual sacrifice or execution.

The Girl of Yde was found by peat cutters in 1897. Two millennia later, her features are still hauntingly clear.

The acidic waters of the peat bog tanned the girl’s skin and turned her blonde hair reddish-gold. Seeing her look so lifelike was unsettling, and we felt uneasy staying in the room.

In the 1990s, scientists used medical scans of her skull to create a famous facial reconstruction, making her one of the most recognizable faces of the ancient world.

Next, we found ourselves staring at these huge displays of ancient pottery. It was a mix of preserved pots, glued-together ones, and literal piles of shards, looking like a hopeless jigsaw puzzle.

Incredible Stone Age pottery unearthed from beneath the dolmens.

Most of the drinking cups, buckets, and bowls dated back to between 4000 and 2000 BCE, the era of the dolmens. I recalled a theory that these elaborate patterns originally started just to show who owned which dish, before eventually evolving into a kind of visual identity for different families or tribes.

A classic Bell Beaker pot from the Late Stone Age. Prehistoric potters created those patterns by pressing a notched stamp or cord into the wet clay.

We thought the Girl of Yde was as eerie as it would get, but then we came across the flattened, leathery remains of the Zweeloo Woman. She might have been sacrificed simply for being different from her Iron Age neighbors; modern scans revealed she had a rare genetic disorder that left her with unusually short, bowed limbs. Her bones carry over twenty knife marks, leaving archaeologists to argue over whether she met a violent end or was just laid to rest with unusual funeral customs.

Centuries of pressure inside the bog flattened her remains, turning her body into a silhouette.

The last thing we expected to walk away with was a cute Highland cow plush from the museum shop. Oksanka was cuddling it the entire time at the café in Assen, while I was having vivid flashbacks to my morning encounter with actual cows ready to charge to protect their calves.

Cycling to the Hunebedcentrum in Borger through the rainy forest

A much-needed dose of cuteness after a few hours with the prehistoric dead.

Recharged after a quick coffee, we continued exploring Drenthe. The clouds lowered, looking even more menacing, but the sun still managed to pour its light through sporadic openings.

Watching the remote downpours that we luckily didn’t have to cycle through. Yet.

We soon arrived at dolmen D14 in Eext. The bright, sunny boulders looked awesome, contrasting against the deep shade of the trees and that dark-blue sky. It’s an 18-meter-long structure, one of the country’s biggest. It has eighteen supporting stones and six capstones left from the original eight or nine, plus the remnants of the entrance. When Albert van Giffen excavated here in 1927, he unearthed 20,000 shards of ancient pottery from the chamber!

These weathered grey stones cut through the velvety carpet of green.

Right as we rolled away from D14, it started raining. Just a soft drizzle, though — nothing that could ruin the ride. We thought it was time for a quick break from the dolmens, so we headed to check out some gorgeous forest lakes.

You can tell which way the wind always blows here; all the pines were noticeably leaning to the east.

The road soon became a dirt track through the woods, and I had to watch my lines to weave around deep puddles.

Weirdly pleasant to watch a dark rain cloud drift far away from us.

We were looking for a specific cluster of lakes:

Hemelrijk — a natural Ice Age fen. It’s blocked off to give it a chance to heal from decades of tourist damage, so we didn’t get close.
‘t Nije Hemelriek — a recreational lake created in the 1960s to give swimming vacationers an alternative to the fragile Ice Age pond.
Gasselterveld — a large lake with sandy beaches and turquoise water. It used to be an industrial sand quarry and is up to 50 meters deep.

Time to find shelter, fast. Meanwhile, Oksanka is making her way along the opposite side of the lake.

As we walked around ‘t Nije Hemelriek, we could see the rain clouds creeping up on us from the west.

A perfect lake mirror, so calming.

Just before the downpour began, we ducked inside a cafe for shelter. I ordered a local craft beer, only to find a surprising connection to the start of our trip: it was from Maallust, a brewery housed in the former forced-labor mill of the Veenhuizen prison colony!

This beer was called “Zware Jongen” (“Heavy Boy”) — a Dutch slang term for a hardened criminal.

It wasn’t that we didn’t appreciate a lovely lunch, but we were worried about arriving late at the Hunebedcentrum — the dolmen museum in the village of Borger. So we picked up the pace and eventually got an hour and a half to explore the place.

Oksanka tests the headspace inside the life-sized dolmen reconstruction. Funy enough, she matches the exact average height of the Funnelbeaker people who built them.

Inside, they built a fantastic full-scale replica of a dolmen interior. We stepped into that dark, enclosed space and tried to feel how our ancestors used these eerie chambers for cremations and burial rituals.

A look inside a prehistoric funeral: this diorama shows how they laid out pottery and tools alongside the body.

Prehistoric houses in the Hunebedcentrum and the largest dolmen of the Netherlands

After checking out the exhibition, we headed out to the park with reconstructed prehistoric dwellings — something Oksanka had been looking forward to for a long time. And the drizzle gave us a perfect chance to test how well these houses sheltered people from the elements.

The first one we came across was a reindeer hunters’ hut, essentially just leather sheets draped over a cone of sticks. It was designed to be lean so you could easily pack it up and move on while chasing the herd. Such tents were popular at the end of the last Ice Age, around 13,000 BCE, when this entire region was a tundra.

A seasonal shelter from the days when the Netherlands was a cold, treeless tundra roamed by mammoth and reindeer.

Right nearby stood a Mesolithic hut that honestly looked like a large upside-down nest. This design dates back to between 8000 and 5300 BCE. Since the planet was finally warming up, forests began to grow, and people could stay in one area for much longer. They built these huts by weaving hazel branches together and packing them tightly with reeds and turf.

Thousands of years before the first farms appeared, local hunter-gatherers were building these haystack-style huts.

Then we came around a bend and saw a real upgrade in prehistoric real estate — a Neolithic longhouse. This wasn’t a mobile shelter, but a permanent communal home built by the Funnelbeaker culture — the very same people behind dolmens.

Finally, four walls and a proper roof. A massive leap forward in local architecture!

Such longhouses dotted the landscape between 3400 and 2850 BCE, constructed with heavy oak posts, thick clay-plastered walls, and tall thatched roofs covered in a plush moss carpet. What blew my mind was that the layout of the farmhouses you see in Dutch villages today almost hasn’t changed for over five thousand years!

We ducked inside to wait out the passing shower—not a single drip fell on our heads.

The Iron Age farmhouse was less of a surprise since it kept the same layout as the Late Stone Age version, just with cleaner craftsmanship and a sturdier frame.

An entire Iron Age farmstead with a workshop and a granary on stilts to keep mice away from the harvest.

The interior was gloomy yet cozy, without any windows aside from two ventilation openings high up in the sides of the roof. To protect the fire, a sheet of leather was stretched above the hearth just in case the thatch leaked. Half of the dwelling was reserved for the family, while the other half was meant for domestic animals.

We wondered if that roof opening could actually keep the interior smoke-free when a real fire was roaring.

We managed to see everything before the closure and walked to check out the biggest dolmen in the Netherlands, located nearby. Dolmen D27 features nine enormous capstones resting on twenty-six support pillars, plus an intact gateway. It holds the dolmen record for the single largest boulder, weighing an estimated 20 tons!

The biggest Dutch dolmen. Archaeologists believe it wasn’t just a local grave, but a central ritual hub of several communities.

This site also hosted the first documented archaeological dig in the Netherlands. In 1685, poetess Titia Brongersma hired local farmers to dig beneath the stones, unearthing clay pots filled with cremated bones. Even today, secrets remain: modern ground scans revealed a stone floor sealed 30–40 centimeters below the surface.

Right on cue, the rain started again.

For centuries, people thought these stone piles were the work of legendary giants called “huynen.” Because of that myth, Titia popularized the name “hunebed,” or “giant’s bed.” Ironically, the Funnelbeaker people who built dolmens averaged a modest 1.65 meters in height.

Oh, and did you know how these granite boulders appeared in a country without a single mountain range? They were pushed here from Finland by glaciers during the Saalian Ice Age 150,000 years ago and left behind when the ice melted. Right behind the museum fence, we found an entire field of these stones, labeled with their mineral names.

Imported straight from Finland — for prehistoric construction works.

As we waited out the storm under a bike shelter, I kept an eye on the beautiful Bronze Age farmhouse behind the fence. After a long day of playing cat-and-mouse with the downpours, we were both ready to just dry off and relax at our B&B, so I was weighing our route options.

A charming Bronze Age dwelling under a heavy spring sky.

As we rode on, we spotted more dolmens, but none of them compared in size or completeness to the incredible examples we had seen. I only pulled over once, near D22, drawn by its silhouette merged with a nearby tree.

Nature reclaiming ancient history.

Remember my clever attempt to map out the fastest way to our B&B? In short, I failed spectacularly. The line looked smooth on the map, but the actual path was a winding dirt track choked with overgrown grass and blocked by deep puddles, forcing us off the saddles to drag the bike across slippery mud. Under Oksanka’s angry gaze, I didn’t dare pull out my camera to photograph the worst sections.

A path so wild we had it entirely to ourselves.

Luckily, we soon rolled onto a decent road and even spotted a lone strip of white tulips left in the middle of empty fields.

Found a lone patch of white tulips along the way.

When we arrived, our room was warm and cozy, and we finally got some well-deserved rest.

Museum Village Orvelte and the last dolmens of Drenthe

The next day, we slept in. No 5 a.m. photo tours. But after a relaxed breakfast, we did visit an interesting place — Museum Village Orvelte. However, just a couple of kilometers from the village, we got caught in a sudden hailstorm in the open field. I managed to spot a tree where we took cover for several minutes until the worst of the cloud passed.

You see a dark cloud and think “just some drizzle,” but then the hail starts hitting your face.

Orvelte was a thatched-roof open-air museum, preserved exactly as it looked in the 19th century: with cobblestone paths, traditional Saxon farmhouses, and no cars in the streets.

The cobblestones and thatched roofs of Orvelte.

We wandered around, turning wherever something caught our eye. At one intersection, I said my favorite Lord of the Rings quote aloud: “If you’re in doubt, Meriadoc, always follow your nose.” That is how we ended up at a tiny bakery with an entrance so low we had to bow to get in. Inside, we bought a fresh, still-steaming “turfsteker.” This local specialty is a sweet spiced cake shaped like a block of turf, a nod to the historical peat industry of Drenthe. Locals cut turfsteker into thick slices, spread them with a generous layer of butter, and serve them alongside coffee or tea as an afternoon snack.

This bad boy smelled through the bag all the way back home.

We noticed a few sheds along the streets storing blocks of turf. Because the Netherlands has always lacked forests, people used these dried blocks, cut from the bogs, as fuel for heating and cooking.

Symbols of Drenthe all in one frame: the provincial flag waving over the peat shed.

Old farming artifacts filled the village. My personal favorite was a wooden pasture gate counterbalanced with a heavy stone on a chain.

Lush meadows in the center of the village.

Eventually, we reached total sensory overload. We still hadn’t dried out from the hail, and our gear felt cold and clammy, so we made a beeline for Emmen to get a train home. There was only one final stop — naturally, another dolmen. D49 is known as the “Church without Papists.” Its nickname comes from the 16th century, when Protestants used its flat stones as a makeshift pulpit to hold secret, illegal services away from Catholic authorities.

An absolute textbook example of a dolmen, with every piece sitting exactly where it belongs.

Unlike everything we’d seen before, D49 had both the burial chamber in the center and the ring of outer stones marking the shape of the mound. It was even half-covered by earth, just like in ancient times. But it didn’t just survive the centuries like that. It turns out good ol’ Professor Albert van Giffen decided to turn the site into an educational showpiece. In 1959, he sacrificed a nearby dolmen for spare parts to finish D49, all to show travelers how these ancient tombs looked before centuries of erosion and plundering laid them bare. Naturally, we spent the remaining kilometers to Emmen arguing whether his experimental reconstruction was a great service to history or if it caused more harm than good.