At the mouth of the North Sea Canal, where giant locks let ocean-going ships into the waterway that leads to Amsterdam, a round island fort sits in the middle of the harbour. This is Fort IJmuiden, also called Forteiland, built in the 1880s as the westernmost stronghold of the Defence Line of Amsterdam, a ring of forts, dikes and flood fields designed to protect the capital by inundating the land around it. The Defence Line, now part of the UNESCO-listed Dutch Water Defence Lines, is one of the more ingenious military systems ever devised: rather than walls, it relied on water a few decimetres deep, too shallow for boats and too deep for marching.
During the Second World War the Germans occupied the fort and added it to their Atlantic Wall, building bunkers on and around it; the coastline of IJmuiden and Wijk aan Zee still has many of them, some of them open as museums. Forteiland can be visited on guided tours by boat in season.
IJmuiden itself is a working port town, dominated by the steelworks of Tata Steel on the northern side of the canal, whose blast furnaces and chimneys loom over the dunes. The North Sea lock, opened in 2022, is the largest sea lock in the world, and watching container ships and cruise liners squeeze through is quite a sight. The beach at IJmuiden aan Zee is wide and popular with kite surfers.
The riding is coastal and flat, as you would expect in the Netherlands. The dune roads along the coast, between Zandvoort, IJmuiden and Wijk aan Zee, run through landscapes of marram grass, pine woods and low sand hills, with the North Sea glinting beyond. Wind is the big factor, often strong and gusty. To cross the canal you take a free ferry, or the tunnels further east. Speed cameras are common in the Netherlands, and limits are strictly enforced. IJmuiden has plenty of fuel, supermarkets and fish restaurants; the harbour area is famous for fresh fish, especially kibbeling, battered chunks of cod, and herring served raw with onions. Wijk aan Zee hosts a famous chess tournament every January.