Dwingelderveld

Dwingelderveld is what the whole Drenthe plateau looked like before the reclamations: heath to the horizon, but wet — the water table sits at the surface across much of the park, and the Calluna is interleaved with cross-leaved heath, bog moss and some forty vennen, the dark little pools that stripe the plain with sky. At roughly its full extent it is the largest wet heathland left in western Europe, which is a category the Netherlands invented by destroying the rest; the park exists because the villages of Dwingeloo and Ruinen kept this stretch as common sheep-walk long enough for the conservationists of the 1920s and later the state to buy in, and it was designated a national park in 1991.

The upkeep is medieval in method and deliberate in policy. Two schaapskuddes — working flocks with shepherd and dogs, folded at Ruinen and at the Benderse edge — graze the heather as their predecessors did for a thousand years, and the park has spent decades undoing the twentieth century: farmland in the middle bought out and stripped of its enriched topsoil, drains blocked, a highway's worth of the A28's noise banked away, pine plantation thinned back so the juniper can breathe. The jeneverbes thickets are a park emblem in their own right — gin-scented, theatrically spiky stands that are among the country's largest, and that regenerate almost nowhere else. On the wettest cells, sundew, bog asphodel and all three Dutch heathers grow within a single stride, cranes drop in on migration, and on autumn nights the heath is loud with red deer that have quietly recolonized from the east.

At the park's northwest corner stands its most improbable landmark: the Dwingeloo radio telescope, a 25-metre dish that was briefly, in 1956, the largest in the world, sited here precisely because the heath was the emptiest, quietest ground the astronomers could find — it discovered a pair of nearby galaxies now named for it, and volunteer radio amateurs keep the restored dish listening. The silence that recruited it is now official: the park is a designated stiltegebied, and the loudest scheduled event remains the shepherd's morning departure.

What's worth knowing before you go

The Buitencentrum at Ruinen is the main gateway, with the sheepfold a short walk onto the heath; the Dwingeloo side has the telescope and the Davidsplassen pools. Nearest rail is Hoogeveen or Beilen, bus onward — but this is bicycle country, and the paved heath-crossing lane from Spier to Dwingeloo is one of the great flat rides in the country. Wear something waterproof on your feet in any season; "wet heath" is a promise. Late August is the purple; June brings sundew and hobbies over the vennen; a hard winter turns the pools into a skating archipelago. The connoisseur's timing is a September dawn from the Benderse Berg — mist pooled over forty vennen at once, the flock bells starting up, and the dish on the horizon tilted at something further away.