De Alde Feanen

The name is Frisian for "the old fens", and the park is exactly that: some four thousand hectares of lakes, canals, reedbeds and half-drowned meadow in the low middle of Friesland, all of it man-made by accident. From the sixteenth century onward the peat here was dredged, dried and shipped as fuel, the diggings kept in tidy strips — petgaten of open water between legakkers, the narrow baulks left standing to dry the turf on. Then storms and neglect ate the baulks, strips merged into lakes, and the industry drowned its own landscape. What the diggers left behind is now the finest surviving stretch of that laagveen world, and the whole succession still runs in it: open water closing over with water soldier, thickening to quaking bog you can stand on while it wobbles, stiffening to reedland and finally to swamp forest of alder and birch.

The birds sort themselves along that same gradient. Black terns nest on the rafts of water soldier, one of the country's strongholds; purple herons and bitterns hunt the reed edges; hobbies take dragonflies over the pools all summer. In the blauwgraslanden — the wet, late-mown "blue meadows" that survive nowhere else at this scale — orchids and globeflower hang on under a mowing calendar unchanged in a century. Otters worked their way back in the 2000s along the wet axis from Overijssel and are established again, and in winter the open water fills with whooper swans and white-fronted geese down from the taiga. Most of the park is managed by It Fryske Gea, the Frisian conservation society, and the signage leads with Frisian — the designation in 2006 made it a national park, but it never stopped being a Frisian one.

This is a park with almost no interior roads; the paths are water. Locals move through it in sloops and punts the way other parks are walked, and the village at its heart, Earnewâld, lives from boatyards and hire jetties. It is also skûtsje country — the big flat-bottomed cargo sailboats that race each July in the SKS fleet have a museum village here, and seeing one heeled over on the Wide Ie with a park full of terns behind it is about as Frisian as an afternoon gets.

What's worth knowing before you go

Earnewâld is the gateway: visitor centre, boat hire of every grade, and marked canoe routes of two to fifteen kilometres threading the petgaten. A boat — even a rented electric sloop for two hours — shows you more of the park than any path can; the walking is limited to edge trails and the excellent boardwalk loops near the centre. Come mid-May to early July for terns and blooming bogbean, or November for geese in raw light. The connoisseur's move is an evening paddle into the Princenhof water maze when the day boats are back at their jetties — herons stalk the margins, and the reed goes loud with sedge warblers as the light drops.