Utrechtse Heuvelrug

The Utrechtse Heuvelrug is the Netherlands' second forest, a push moraine the Saale ice shoved up a hundred and fifty thousand years ago, running as a wooded wall from the Gooi down to the Rhine at Rhenen. The national park, designated in 2003 and since enlarged, takes in the ridge's southern reach — the long crests and dry valleys between Zeist and the Grebbeberg — where sixty-nine metres of altitude at the Amerongse Berg count as genuine uplands and the beech and oak run unbroken for an afternoon's walk. It is a dry landscape on deep sand: rainwater vanishes into the ridge and surfaces decades later at its feet, which is why the flanks are strung with springs, brooks and the moats of country houses, and why the crest carries heath and drift sand where the medieval commons wore the forest away — the Leersumse Veld's heather pools and the open sand at Kwintelooijen are the wild interludes in the trees.

The ridge's human story is stately. Along its southern foot runs the Stichtse Lustwarande, the "pleasure garden" of a hundred estates and villas that Utrecht and Amsterdam money built from the seventeenth century onward on the agreeable dry ground; their landscaped woods — Amerongen's castle park, the Kaapse Bossen with its lookout tower — are now stitched into the park itself. History's odder lodger stands at Doorn: Huis Doorn, the moated manor where Kaiser Wilhelm II lived out his exile from 1920 to 1941, still furnished as he left it. And around Amerongen and Elst the ridge-foot villages ran, of all things, a tobacco industry for three centuries — the tall black tabaksschuren that dried the crop still stand among the orchards, the most improbable agricultural relics in the country.

The southern full stop is the Grebbeberg, where the ridge drops sheer to the Rhine. Its slope carries the Grebbelinie's casemates and a military cemetery from May 1940, when the Dutch line here held the German assault for three days; the view from the top — the river making its bend below, Betuwe orchards beyond — is the finest in the province and was fought for accordingly. Red deer, absent for centuries, have been re-established in the woods between Leersum and Amerongen, and pine martens and ravens came back on their own; the ridge is quietly rewilding under its estate manners.

What's worth knowing before you go

The park has no single gate; it has railway stations. Driebergen-Zeist, Maarn and Rhenen all put you on trailheads within minutes, and the bus along the old Wageningen road serves every village between; Doorn and Leersum make the best bases. The essential long walk is the ridge traverse from Maarn or Doorn over the Kaapse Bossen and Amerongse Berg to the Grebbeberg — a full day, all woods and heath, ending at the war cemetery and the river view. Book Huis Doorn for the strangest hour of Dutch-German history, and time Leersumse Veld for August heather or a misty October morning. The connoisseur's detail is at Amerongen: a tobacco barn still in use by the local historical society, and a castle cellar tasting of the wine the estate — improbably, at this latitude — now grows on the ridge's south slope.