Weerribben-Wieden

Weerribben-Wieden is an industrial site that flooded so thoroughly it became the largest lowland peat marsh in northwest Europe. From the sixteenth century the peat here was dredged from below the waterline — scooped up in long trekgaten strips and dried on the ribben between them — and the two halves of the park record the two grades of care taken. In the Weerribben, in the north, the discipline held, and the strip pattern survives with graphic precision: water and land in kilometre-long alternating bars, best seen from the air but legible from any canoe. In the Wieden the diggers overreached — the baulks were cut too narrow to survive storms, and in 1776 and 1825 the waves broke through, merging the diggings into open lakes and taking the village of Beulake down with them; the church tower of its successor at Sint Jansklooster now surveys a soft inland sea of wijden, reed islands and floating fen.

What the industry left, succession has been braiding back toward land ever since, and the park's glory is that every stage of that verlanding is present at once: open water clogging with water soldier, kraggen — floating mats you can pole a punt against — thickening into quaking fen, fen stiffening into orchid-rich veenmosrietland, and finally carr woodland of alder and willow. Two flagship animals bookend the story. The otter, extinct in the Netherlands by 1988, was reintroduced exactly here in 2002, and every otter in the country descends from the Weerribben-Wieden restart; and the grote vuurvlinder, the large copper butterfly in its subspecies batava, exists in this park and nowhere else on the planet — a copper-orange July insect whose entire global range is a set of Overijssel fen meadows.

The marsh works for its living still. Kalenberg and the reed villages harvest winter reed on a scale unmatched in Europe — the thatch on a respectable share of the continent's roofs grew in these strips, and the cutters' management is precisely what keeps the fen open for the butterflies and black terns. At the park's edge sits Giethoorn, the canal village the world has decided is the "Dutch Venice"; it is genuinely of this landscape — a peat-diggers' settlement on its own strips — though the park's soul is in the empty labyrinth beyond the last whisper-boat turning point.

What's worth knowing before you go

Two visitor centres divide the park honestly: Buitencentrum De Weerribben at Ossenzijl for the northern strips, and De Wieden at Sint Jansklooster for the lakes; Steenwijk is the rail approach to both. This is another park whose paths are water — hire a canoe, an electric sloop, or the traditional punter, and take the marked routes into the strip maze, where fifty metres off the main channel the twenty-first century goes silent. July is the appointment for the vuurvlinder (the marked fen-meadow trails near Ossenzijl; it flies in sun, mid-morning) and for purple loosestrife over black water; winter turns the reed gold at cutting time and, in a hard year, the whole park into the country's most beautiful skating network. Giethoorn: see it, but at eight in the morning or from a canoe, and then leave its crowds behind — the park begins where the boat-hire queue ends.