The Windmills at Kinderdijk, The Netherlands

An impressive World Heritage site

The windmills at Kinderdijk in the Netherlands are not only a beautiful and impressive sight as they stand, but they are also an important historical relic and testimony to the ingenuity of the Dutch people.

Land from the sea

The people of the Netherlands have a long history of creating farmland from what Nature intended should be the floor of the sea! Land reclamation began in about 1000 AD with the building of dykes (sea walls) to prevent the sea from inundating the low-lying land of Holland and Utrecht.

Efforts to drain marshland and create new farmland began in the 14th century with the digging of canals and regulation of the flow of water through a network of sluices and reservoirs. The new farmland proved to be fertile and peaty, and ideal for pasture and crop-growing.

However, the process of drainage behind the dykes caused the reclaimed land to sink below the level of the sea and therefore become subject to flooding from both the sea and the major rivers that flow through the region (notably the Rhine and its distributaries). A method was needed to lift excess water from the farmland (known as polder land) so that it could be deposited on the other side of the dykes.