The name tells you what is here, a culvert, a small tunnel for water under a path or a bank, and the humble nature of the place is its charm. The Netherlands is a country made of managed water, and this part of Utrecht, on the eastern edge of the city near the university campus of De Uithof, is cut by streams, ditches and old defensive works that were all designed to move water about, or to hold it back. A culvert is the kind of detail that engineers make a country work with, and that most travellers never see.
The area has a double history. Roman engineers built a road along the south bank of the Kromme Rijn, the Crooked Rhine, as part of the frontier, linking the fort of Traiectum, in the middle of modern Utrecht, with forts upstream, and traces of its line are still followed by the cycle paths and lanes east of the city. Much later, in the nineteenth century, the Dutch built a defensive barrier called the New Dutch Water Line, a series of forts and flooded fields stretching from the Zuiderzee to the south, designed to keep invaders at bay by drowning the land in a thin sheet of water. Fort Werk IV, one of the ride's other stops, belongs to that system, and its dams, sluices and culverts were its working parts.
For a rider, the roads around here are excellent for gentle, easy riding. The land is flat and green, the lanes are narrow, and there is a dense web of cycle paths, which are not for motorbikes and carry heavy cyclist traffic. Roads shared with bicycles require care at junctions and roundabouts, where cyclists have priority. Speed limits are low, often sixty or even thirty in built-up areas, and traffic is strictly policed. Rain showers pass quickly, and in autumn mist lies on the fields in the mornings.
Utrecht is a city of nearly three hundred thousand people, so fuel, food and everything else is plentiful, and the old centre is beautiful, with its canals, wharf cellars and the tall Dom tower. De Uithof, the campus area, has cafes and shops on the edge. A small detail such as a culvert becomes an excuse to look at the landscape more closely, and to think of the generations of Dutch who kept their feet dry.