The Netherlands Waterland: From Terp to Delta Plan
The history of the Netherlands is a history of living with water. The very first inhabitants already sought ways to deal with the destructive force of rivers and the sea, or to harness it to their advantage. Over the centuries, we have developed increasingly clever techniques and have grown better at working together to control the water.
The Netherlands looked very different a thousand years before our era. Large parts of the present-day country were still underwater or consisted of swampy peat bogs. People could only live permanently in the highest areas. Around 500 BC, it was the Frisians who were the first to attempt to protect themselves from the water by creating mounds of clay for settlements: terpen. They built thousands of terpen along the Frisian coast, from Zeeland to Denmark, all by hand and with spades. The highest remaining terp in the Netherlands is located near the village of Hegebeintum, with a peak of 8.8 meters above sea level. Once, this terp was as large as fourteen football fields.
Around 50 BC, the Romans arrived in the Netherlands. They found the Frisian mounds to be a pitiful sight. "There, a pitiable people," wrote Pliny the Elder, "sitting on high heaps, built by their own hands, up to where the highest tide reaches." The Romans did not try to avoid the water but to master it. They built dams, bridges, and sluices (which facilitated drainage using the ebb and flow of tides). They also constructed harbours and canals. The most famous of these is the Corbulo Canal, connecting Forum Hadriani (Voorburg) and Matilo (Leiden). Thanks to this canal, named after the general who constructed it, ships no longer had to sail across the treacherous North Sea. The calm waters of the canal offered a much safer route.
The Romans also dug ditches to drain the peat soil, making it suitable for agriculture or construction. Think of the beach: when you dig a hole, water from higher areas flows into the hole. However, the ditches also caused more flooding. Peat is like a sponge, and without water, it shrinks. The ground sank, and the risk of flooding increased. Large parts of the western coastal area became uninhabitable again from the third century AD for a long time.
It wasn’t until the seventh and eighth centuries that the sea and rivers had deposited enough sand and gravel onto the land (siltation) for people to once again settle there. Small towns emerged along the rivers, as people could trade well from there by boat. Water was no longer just a threat but also a key factor in economic growth.
"God made the Earth, the Dutch made their coasts."
There is an old saying that perfectly expresses how important hydraulic engineering is to Dutch history: “God made the Earth, the Dutch made their coasts.” In other words, we have pulled our little country from the clutches of the water. This saying probably originated from a poem by 17th-century theologian James Fraser. During a tour of Europe, he also visited the Dutch Republic and wrote a poem in his travelogue:
Gods made their land, the Hollanders their shore;
That was a mighty work, but this was more.
Gods in their work no obstacle did find;
Gainst Hollanders both Sea and Land combined;
And Nature too. In this then lay the odds,
They made their dikes, in spite of all the Gods.
The Great Reclamation
Around the year 800, the Netherlands was still largely a marshy mess. But that began to change. New farming techniques made it possible to cultivate the challenging peat soil, such as an iron plough that could dig deeper into the ground and more efficient crop rotation.
From 900 onwards, these techniques were applied on a large scale. Counts and bishops in the western Netherlands saw their opportunity to expand their land and increase its yield using the new methods. They began making agreements with their subjects, known as copen. If the subjects cleared a piece of peatland for farming (reclamation), they were allowed to live on it as free farmers. Of course, they had to remain loyal to their lord and pay taxes. This marked the beginning of the Great Reclamation, which lasted for 300 years and led to the creation of the first polders.
The Great Reclamation thus created much agricultural land, but also led to more water issues. Just like with the Romans, draining and digging out the land increased the risk of flooding. To keep the fields dry, dikes were built and sluices were installed to discharge excess water. Each farmer was responsible for the section of dike bordering their land, known as their "hoefslag". Farmers within the same polder elected heemraden to oversee all these dike sections. If a hoefslag was not properly maintained, the responsible farmer would be fined.
Simple dikes developed into ring dikes around polders or sea dikes against the sea. New land was diked to reclaim it from the sea, and sea channels and small rivers were dammed. In these areas, cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam were founded.
Hydropower
Water was not only a danger; it was increasingly used to benefit people. In the 13th century, the ports of Middelburg, Zierikzee, and Veere, for example, used water as an energy source for their tidal mills. At high tide, a basin was filled with seawater, and at low tide, the water flowed past the mill. This set a waterwheel in motion, which dredged the harbour bed, ensuring that the port remained deep enough for ships.
The Emergence of Water Boards
The more land was converted into agricultural land, the greater the need for protection against water. At a certain point, maintaining just your own dike was no longer enough. Because if the drainage or dike of the land further down was not in order, the river or the sea would still surge into your polder with full force.
Take the drainage of the Oude Rijn, for example. The Count of Holland constructed a dam at Zwammerdam to protect his polders, but this caused flooding in the area of the Bishop of Utrecht. In the end, they agreed that the dam should be removed, and the first water board in the Netherlands was established to manage water control: the Hoogheemraadschap of Rijnland (1255).
"Zij comen d'een uuijt Westerwolt, dandere uuijt Wals-Brabant oft Kempen, ende weten al soo veule van verloopen, zeewaeteren oft dijcken als een soch (van) met lepelen (t)eten…"
In the water board, various interests converged: a city wanted something different from a fishing village, and the demands of a landowner differed from those of a farmer. The water board weighed all these interests. It was chaired by a representative of the count, the dijkgraaf, and the administrators were elected from the nobility, clergy, and prosperous citizens. As such, the water board is the oldest democratic institution in the Netherlands and the source of our political "polder model."
However, things were not always so democratic in the early water boards. Noble families often appointed each other to important positions, overseers were bribed to turn a blind eye when maintenance was neglected, and ordinary farmers were not listened to. Andries Vierlingh, Master Dijkgraaf (1507-1579) of the Graaf-Hendrikpolder in West Brabant, fiercely opposed such injustice. Due to the cronyism, he had little trust in his colleagues. According to Vierlingh, they knew as much about dikes as "a pig knows about eating with a spoon."
Hensbeker
Each water board had a hensbeker to drink from together on special occasions, such as after completing a dike or appointing a new board member. This ritual is centuries old and still continues today!
This silver example from the Water Board of Groot-Haarlemmermeer, dated 1884, was originally a gift and was only first used as a hensbeker in 1990. In 2005, the water board merged with the Hoogheemraadschap Rijnland, and the goblet moved with it.
The Netherlands is drained
Democratic or not, the water boards generally did good work. They gradually gained better control over water management, and the economy in the Netherlands also improved. The population grew and needed more fuel to keep warm in the winter. A key fuel source was found in dried peat. So, the peatlands were not only drained for agriculture but were also completely dug out to below the water level. This led to the creation of hundreds of lakes, which each year swallowed up more land, and during floods, they grew into each other. These lakes were called "water wolves" because they greedily devoured the land.
In the 16th century, scientists and wealthy citizens began to wonder if they could drain these large lakes to grow crops again. The mathematician Simon Stevin, for example, came up with the idea of a molengang (mill circuit): he arranged multiple polder mills in a row at different heights so that the water could be transported over larger height differences. In the following century, water engineer Jan Adriaanszoon Leeghwater built on this idea. He invented the bovenkruiende mill, in which the top cap of the mill could turn to always face the wind (to kruien), and a screw (known as a vijzel) that pumped water much more efficiently than the traditional scoop wheel.
Defending with water
The mathematician Simon Stevin made many more inventions beyond the molengang, such as a way to use water in military defense. He came up with a method for breaching dikes so that enemy armies could be repelled by flooding certain areas of land. During the Dutch Revolt, this tactic was used several times against the Spaniards. Later, the Dutch Waterlines were constructed to implement this tactic even more effectively in times of great need.
With these technological innovations and the economic prosperity of the seventeenth century, a grandiose plan was conceived: to drain the Beemster. First, a dike was constructed around the polder, stretching 42 kilometers in length. With the help of Leeghwater and his mills, the polder was emptied in five years (1607-1612). After that, roads, fields, ditches, and farms were laid out according to a precise grid of square and rectangular plots. This marked the first time that the polder landscape, so characteristic of the Netherlands, was created. Meanwhile, the mills continued to operate to keep the water level stable. This way, the new inhabitants of the Beemster kept their feet dry while ensuring that the crops had sufficient water.
The success of the Beemster sparked a full-fledged 'drainage mania'. Leeghwater himself was involved in the draining of Purmer (1622), Heerhugowaard (1625), Starnmeer and De Wormer (1626), and Schermer (1635). Dutch water expertise was also exported: Leeghwater assisted with land reclamation in Germany, France, and England. He was also one of the first to advocate draining the Haarlemmermeer, although that would only be done two centuries later. Approximately 10 percent of the current land in the Netherlands comes from land reclamation projects.
However, there was also a downside to this land reclamation. The Beemster was an economic success, but it was more the exception than the rule. Due to sabotage, lawsuits, dike breaches, or infertile land, many drainage projects ended disastrously. For every successful polder capitalist, there was another who had driven himself into ruin.
A renowned expert in water
The water engineer Jan Adriaanszoon Leeghwater (Leegwhater translateable as 'empty water') has a very fitting name, and that’s no coincidence! In September 1606, he dove into the Amsterdam Wetering with a self-designed diving bell. He brought along a few pears and pen and paper. Three-quarters of an hour later, he emerged with a few bites of pears and, on his paper, the message: "I have written this for Amsterdam in the Wetering underwater." After this, he adopted the name 'Leeghwater', so everyone knew that he had conquered the water.
National coordination, larger projects
The land reclamations had drained the interior of the Netherlands, but the water from outside remained a threat. Floods still occurred regularly, with significant consequences for the densely populated lowlands. Just as local or regional solutions had once been insufficient a few hundred years earlier, the call for a national approach grew louder. Just as the first water board arose from a dispute between Holland and Utrecht, a national collaboration emerged in the eighteenth century from a dispute with Germany over the distribution of Rhine water across the Waal, the Nederrijn, and the IJssel.
A key figure in this was the water engineer Christiaan Brunings. In 1769, he was appointed 'Inspector-General of the Country’s Rivers' and from that point on, he was essentially the head of Dutch water management for more than thirty years. Under his leadership, the management of major waterways, flood defenses, and land reclamation projects was organized by the state for the first time. New regulations and better oversight led to better-maintained dikes, dams, and quays. In 1798, at the age of 61, Brunings was appointed head of the Bureau of Water Management, thus becoming the undisputed founder of the later Rijkswaterstaat.
In the following century, new technologies pushed water engineering further. The invention of the steam engine and materials such as iron, steel, and concrete made larger interventions in nature possible. Under the 'King of Canals,' William I, 481 kilometers of canals were dug, financed with profits from the exploitation of Dutch colonies in Indonesia, complete with locks such as the North Holland Canal and the Zuid-Willemsvaart. Steam dredging machines kept the rivers at the proper depth, and the Haarlemmermeer (1852) was drained. Increasingly clever engineers constructed the Nieuwe Waterweg (1872) and the North Sea Canal (1876), enabling steamships to travel directly from the coast to the ports of Rotterdam and Amsterdam.
Zeeland and Napoleon
In 1808, a severe flood struck Zeeland. Napoleon, who was ruling the Netherlands at the time, looked at the poor state of the dikes and wondered whether it was even worth repairing them. Fortunately, Andries Schraver, the first chief engineer of Rijkswaterstaat in Zeeland, managed to change the emperor's mind.
Schraver had not received formal training but had taught himself all the knowledge of water engineering. He pointed out the strategic importance of Zeeland to Napoleon and promised to personally oversee the restoration work. It almost went wrong when Napoleon saw that Schraver was using a silver surveyor’s compass that he had received from an English engineer – the enemy! "Are the English your friends?" the emperor asked. To which Schraver replied, "Sire, in art, there are neither friends nor enemies." Apparently, Napoleon appreciated this straightforward attitude, because the next day Schraver received a gold watch as a token of gratitude for his services.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Netherlands looked quite similar to the country we know today. However, we still had two major projects ahead: the Zuiderzee Works and the Delta Works. The 1916 flood disaster provided the impetus to close off the Zuiderzee with the Afsluitdijk (1932) and reclaim the Wieringermeer (1925), followed by the drainage of the Noordoostpolder (1936), Oostelijk Flevoland (1957), and Zuidelijk Flevoland (1968). Just like during the Great Reclamation and the land reclamations, this created a vast amount of new agricultural land.
While Flevoland was still under development, a second flood disaster showed that southwestern Netherlands was still not safe: the 1953 Flood Disaster. The impact was immense, and within a year, Rijkswaterstaat began constructing the Delta Works, the largest water engineering project in Dutch history. Between 1956 and 1998, the Netherlands built various dams, flood barriers, and locks to make Zeeland safer and more accessible.
New challenges
Even after the Delta Works, water management in the Netherlands is far from over. After high water levels in 1993 and 1995, the Dutch government decided that the river areas needed to be made safer. The 'Room for the River' program marked a shift in thinking about water management. Instead of only focusing on canalizing, draining, and raising dikes, we are increasingly trying to create space for the river and the water that inevitably flows through our country.
The rising sea levels are forcing us to reconsider techniques and collaborations. How do we keep the Netherlands dry in 10, 50, or 100 years? What will happen with 2, 3, or perhaps 5 meters of sea-level rise? Since 2007, a new Delta Program has been established, and various scenarios are being explored. Should we, like during the land reclamations in the seventeenth century, try to win new pieces of land from the water with large-scale interventions? Or should we try to harness natural processes to our advantage, like the tidal mills of the thirteenth century? Will cooperation on a larger (European) scale help us, as water boards and Rijkswaterstaat improved water management in the past?
If history teaches us anything, it is that new knowledge, techniques, and collaborations will open up new possibilities, but also bring new challenges that we cannot yet foresee. And then we will start again from the beginning.
