The Forest Remembers
Walking the Veluwe, north of Arnhem, and thinking about who else stood there: soldiers, hunters, and people at fires. On a landscape that isn't wilderness, and has been shaped by people for thousands of years.
The first time I walked the Veluwe was in 2021, near Schaarsbergen, just north of Arnhem.
I came out of the trees onto open grassland, and there was a herd of red deer. Beyond them was heather, then forest again.
The Netherlands is one of the most crowded countries on earth. I hadn't expected to find this much room.
Who else stood here
Standing there, I started thinking about who else had stood in that spot.
The first thing I thought of was soldiers. I knew that men had hidden in these woods during the war. The history is more specific. In the autumn of 1944, after the Battle of Arnhem, hundreds of Allied paratroopers were left behind north of the Rhine. Dutch civilians and the resistance hid them in the country between Arnhem, Ede and Apeldoorn, at great risk to themselves. On one night in October, well over a hundred of them were led back across the river.
Then I thought of the hunters. I knew this forest had been kept for the nobility, and protected from poachers. For centuries, hunting here belonged to the counts and dukes of Guelders, and later to the stadtholders and the royal family. They kept the deer and wild boar plentiful. The farmers who lived alongside them were not allowed to hunt the animals eating their rye. Instead they dug ditches and built earth walls along the forest edge to keep the game out, and took turns standing guard. Even so, part of why the forest and its animals are still here is that powerful people wanted them kept.
And then I thought further back. The Veluwe is dotted with prehistoric burial mounds. I pictured people gathered around fires here, under the same moon, thousands of years before anyone drew a border around the Netherlands.
Not pristine
It would be easy to call the Veluwe wilderness. It isn't.
The trees I walked under are mostly young. As early as the Stone Age, people cleared forest here with fire. For centuries after, farmers grazed sheep on the heath and cut the heather sod to mix with manure for their fields. They took so much that in places the land gave way to drifting sand, a desert in the middle of Europe, made by people.
Then people planted it back. From the end of the 19th century, they put in pine and oak, later beech and Douglas fir, in tidy rectangular plots. Much of the pine went to the mines. Today the heather is kept open by grazing, the deer are counted every year, and the cull is decided on a schedule.
So the forest itself is newer than any of the people I'd been imagining. But there has been forest and heath on this ground, in one form or another, for longer than anyone has kept a record. The soldiers, the hunters and the people at the fires all stood in some version of it.
Still here
People have cut this place, burned it, grazed it down to sand, fenced it, hunted it, hidden in it, and planted it back.
The deer were still there, out on the grass. Beyond them, the heather. Then the forest again.
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