I’m in Denmark, and what I see ahead of me could be the Netherlands, but what is behind me certainly isn’t.
I’m on the coast of Jutland, hidden in the North Sea dunes with the sea out of sight beyond the marram grass and honeysuckle, rose hips and scars of exposed sand. There are collapsed Atlantic Wall bunkers and a dead porpoise. This could be Texel or one of the smaller Wadden islands, even a windblown stretch of Nord Holland.
Behind us it’s different. Beyond a large lagoon - which here they insist on calling a fjord - the land is rich, but featureless and a bit shabby. You see the same great mechanical contrivances that trundle the lanes and fields of rural Netherlands, digging and ploughing and planting with technological rigour. The farms are wealthy, but also, how can I put it… ugly. The brick farmhouses are functional and as plain as a bucket of beige paint. The fields themselves are suggestions with ragged edges and nothing of the precision you get in the Netherlands.
In the last of these I spoke about Flevoland - and by extension much of the reclaimed Netherlands - being a Mondrian landscape of blocks and lines and colours and contrasts. The Dutch simply don’t have the space to waste anything. They’re pressured into that exacting landscape. There simply aren’t enough Danes, especially out here in the sparsely populated west of Jutland, to worry quite so much. This bit of the Danish countryside is consequently a bit pudgy, it’s let itself go, it’s a few pounds over its dating weight. This has renewed my enthusiasm for tramping over the Dutch countryside.
Speaking of which, I’ve just made another video about doing exactly that. This one, part three of the Flevoland walk from Emmeloord to Urk, looks at land reclamation and its impact on the frankly bizarre little (non-)island of Urk.
Quick reminder: my book on the Netherlands, ‘Orange Sky, Rising Water’, is available for pre-order ahead of its publication date in just over a week (some copies have apparently been delivered). Ordering options are here.