Corbulo's canal | Vlietwijk and Droogmakerij de Beemster

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Corbulo's canal | Vlietwijk

   The Vliet, a calm green waterway running between Leiden and The Hague, looks like any other Dutch canal, lined with reeds, cyclists and the occasional houseboat. But it follows, more or less, the route of one of the oldest canals in Western Europe. In about AD 47, the Roman general Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo ordered his soldiers to dig a canal linking the Rhine and the Meuse estuaries, so that boats could move supplies along the coast without risking the North Sea. The historian Tacitus says Corbulo did it partly to keep his troops busy. Traces of the Fossa Corbulonis have been found here at Vlietwijk, near Voorschoten, and the site is part of the Lower German Limes World Heritage Site, inscribed in 2021.

   Read the complete Corbulo's canal | Vlietwijk write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Corbulo's canal | Vlietwijk is where the day begins. Next is Utrecht-Domplein.

2. 2. Utrecht-Domplein

   Dig under the Domplein in Utrecht and you hit a Roman fort. That is not a figure of speech: when the city was rebuilt after the great storm that brought down the nave of the cathedral in 1674, the foundations were already sitting on the foundations of something much older. The Romans built a fort here around the middle of the first century, on a low sandy rise beside the Rhine, and called it Traiectum, the crossing. When the legions left, the name stuck, and a thousand years of sound changes turned it into Utrecht.

   Read the complete Utrecht-Domplein write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Utrecht-Domplein comes up about 58 km into the recorded legs. Next is Droogmakerij de Beemster.

3. 3. Droogmakerij de Beemster

   In 1612 a lake north of Amsterdam disappeared. Wealthy merchants, flush with money from the Dutch trading boom, financed the draining of the Beemster, and the engineer Jan Adriaenszoon Leeghwater used dozens of windmills to pump the water out into a ring canal. What remained was a polder several metres below sea level, laid out in a perfectly regular grid of roads, canals and fields based on Renaissance ideas of order and proportion. The Beemster was inscribed by UNESCO in 1999 as a masterpiece of creative planning, and from above it looks like a ruled sheet of paper.

   Read the complete Droogmakerij de Beemster write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 133 km into the recorded legs you reach Droogmakerij de Beemster. Next is back through Utrecht-Domplein.

4. 4. back through Utrecht-Domplein

   Return visit. Read the place description above.

   Read the complete Utrecht-Domplein write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   back through Utrecht-Domplein, late in the day. Next is Corbulo's canal | Vlietwijk.

5. 5. Corbulo's canal | Vlietwijk

   Return visit. Read the place description above.

   Read the complete Corbulo's canal | Vlietwijk write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Back at Corbulo's canal | Vlietwijk. That is the ride.