Drentsche Aa

The Drentsche Aa is not one river but a family of them: the Anlooërdiepje, the Taarlosche Diep, the Gasterensche Diep and a dozen more little diepjes, each named for the village it passes, braiding together northward off the Drenthe plateau toward Groningen. Every other lowland brook in the country was canalized in the twentieth century; this one escaped because farmers and planners fought the land-consolidation bulldozers to a standstill in the 1960s, and the state blinked first — the valley was set aside in 1965 as a protected stream landscape, the first of its kind, and grew into today's park. The water still takes the long way: hairpin meanders through hay meadows, sandy bends where kingfishers nest, winter floods that lie silver on the maden as they have since the Middle Ages.

What is protected here is a whole agrarian civilization in cross-section. The esdorpen — Anloo, Gasteren, Taarlo, Oudemolen, brink villages with their oak-shaded greens — sit exactly where a thousand years of logic put them, between the essen (the raised communal plough-lands, manured up above the sand) and the stream-side madelanden cut for hay. The park mows those meadows on the old late calendar, and they answer with orchids, globeflower and ragged robin in densities agriculture abolished everywhere else. Deeper time stands about casually: hunebedden — the megalithic dolmens of the funnel-beaker people — at Anloo and Loon, Bronze Age barrows along the ridges, and Celtic field grids under the heath of the Strubben-Kniphorstbosch, an old military exercise ground whose gnarled strubben oaks got protected by artillery, of all guardians.

The park's plainest job is the one that shows least: the Aa is the raw drinking water of the city of Groningen, drawn at De Punt, which makes every upstream pesticide decision a public argument — the flower-bulb fields that crept into the area keep its water politics current. In October 2024 the state quietly retired the park's old mouthful of a title, "Nationaal beek- en esdorpenlandschap", and made it plain Nationaal Park Drentsche Aa; the landscape did not notice, which was rather the point of protecting it this way.

What's worth knowing before you go

There is no single entrance because there is no single site: the park is a web of villages, and the way in is a bicycle. Assen (rail) puts you ten minutes from the southern diepjes; the Homanshof information farm at Anloo and the Drentsche Aa visitor point at Deurze anchor the middle. The essential experience is the meander walk from Oudemolen along the Gasterensche Diep — under an hour, and the whole thesis of the park in one bend. June is orchid time in the maden (stay on paths; the meadows are the treasure), October puts mist on the water and the first flood-shine on the fields. The connoisseur's stop is the tiny Magnuskerk at Anloo, standing on its brink since the eleventh century — the oldest church in Drenthe, in the landscape that explains why it is there.