The star of the north

Bourtange is a small reconstructed fortress that is about 1.5 hours from Groningen. The easiest way to sort out getting there is to ask the very helpful staff at the tourist information in Groningen and they will sort out which trains and buses you need to take. But basically you can only get there with public transport in the morning and out in the afternoon after 2pm. It’s a bit of a hassle but it is only 7 km from the bus stop in Vlagtwedde (the next village) to the fortress so there is always the option of walking the last section. You can also do the area by bike but I would recommend catching the train as far as Windschoten if you are doing it as a day trip or it will be a long ride.

I set off in the morning shortly before 8 am and headed to the train station for the first leg of the journey which is by train as far as Windschoten which is a reasonable sized town that is about halfway between Groningen and Leer. It’s easy to switch to the bus there and the bus station is pretty much straight out of the station and to the right in the big shed thing. There are a couple of different buses that head through the town of Vlagtwedde and I caught the one to Staatskanal. They trundle through all of the villages and it takes quite a while despite the fact that it’s only 17 km or so. At Vlagtwedde Marke (it’s a little bus station in town), you switch to bus 72 which is in fact a taxi for the final 7km to the fortress. The taxi waits for the bus to arrive so you don’t have to worry about it leaving without you (which I did for most of the trip because my bus was running a couple of minutes late). The taxi just stamps off your bus ticket so it doesn’t cost any more than a normal bus. The taxi then drops you off in the car park next to the visitors centre at the entrance of the fortress and this is where it will pick you up again in the afternoon so that you can repeat the same trip in reverse. The time that they leave you is probably a bit excessive in that I caught the last possible connection in the morning and the first possible in the afternoon and still had more than enough time. I suspect if it was a nice day in the summer and all the shops in the fortress were open, you probably could kill some more time than I did but I did look at pretty much everything while I was there (and killed 1.5 hours by walking back to Vlagtwedde instead of waiting for the 2pm bus). Just a tip too. The ticket machines in the stations in the Netherlands only take coins and cards so you either need to carry a lot of coins with you all the time (the return ticket to Windschoten cost just over 11 euros) or go into the station and buy a ticket at the service desk where they take notes. Just a little inconvenience but luckily, it seems that the Dutch all use cards so the queues are short at the service desk.

Anyway, enough about how to get there and onto the fortress. I arrived just before 9.45 and headed into the visitors centre. They are redecorating at the moment so the place is in absolute chaos and I couldn’t find anyone at the desk to buy a map from so gave up and headed into the fortress. It’s not that big anyway so you can hardly get lost.

You walk around a funny twisty road to get to the entrance to the fort. It’s strangely shaped because the whole of the fort is made up of a series of star shapes. The middle is the square (which is actually a pentagon) and then there are 10 roads coming out off it and heading out to the five points of the star made by the walls. There is then a canal that goes around the walls in a star shape with a couple of islands in it that have been built to protect the two town gates. It looks prettiest from the air but you can get the idea once you are up on the walls yourself. I’m calling them walls but basically they are mounds of dirt that have been compacted to form a ridge around the outside. They basically just dug out the canals and then used the dirt to make the walls.

You enter through one of the gates across the drawbridge and you are on a road that will take you through to the main square. I decided that since there were no other tourists around yet (and the taxi driver had told me that they would be arriving in hordes in about an hour), I would go around the fortifications first as they are the best viewpoint for photos of the village and the surrounding countryside. So I headed up the very steep steps next to the gate and onto the top of the wall. It’s not very wide and has a very steep slope down the other side which rapidly ends with the water. I don’t know that I’d bring a small child up there willingly. Amusingly the brochure that I got says that the fortifications are accessible by people in wheelchairs. I’m not quite sure how because the edge is steep enough to make pushing them up impossible and there ain’t no lift. And even if you could get up there the top isn’t all that wide so would be difficult to negotiate. The rest of town however is nice and flat and easily accessible by all.

I headed first in the direction of the windmill which is a replica of the original which is now in a town further north. I should tell you a little of the history of the fort at this point. The current fort isn’t the original and was built in the 1960s based on the plans of the fort from the 18^th century when it was at its biggest. The first fort was built in the 16^th century during the 80 Years War with the Spanish. The surrounding area was pretty much all marshland and there was a single track through the area along the top of a sand dune (tange in Dutch). This was the supply route from Germany into Groningen and William of Orange decided to build the fort there to stop food from making it to the Spanish. It was only a small fort at the time but it did its job eventually and the Dutch reclaimed Groningen. Of course, peace didn’t last long in those days (especially when the Prussians lived just down the road) and they had several other battles in their time. The fortress had various additions made to it including an outpost on the German border. It was never taken during a fight. Eventually the marsh started to dry out (incredible I know given that you only have to dig four foot into the ground to hit water here) and other roads opened up into the area and the fort was no longer needed. It was then dismantled over the years throughout the 18^th century. They filled in the canals and moved or destroyed most of the buildings and turned the area back into farmland. The area hit hard times in the post war period and they had high unemployment. A solution was suggested and that was rebuild the fort and open it as a tourist attraction. They found the old plans and set about redigging the canals and putting back up the buildings. It took a long time but they eventually got there and they have done a very good job. Except for the cars of people who live in town and some electric lights the centre looks much as it did in the 18^th century paintings. It now has 250,000 visitors a year and the area is prospering again.

So anyway, I continued along the top of the fortifications and took lots of photos looking down over the canals which are really still and have great reflections in the early light. You get a good view of the town from the walls as well and you can see the star type layout of the streets as well. Once you get around the other side from the entrance gate you come across the town toilet which used to used by all the soldiers in the village. It’s basically a little hut out on the end of a pier that has a very long drop down into the canal. You sat on the little bar and just let things fall. I imagine the water in the canal was pretty awful as there were up to 120 soldiers in the village at times. I suppose it discouraged the enemy from swimming across and climbing up the walls. They have some of the old cannons in a couple of places and the points of the stars also have the sentry boxes from the fort as well. You can see quite a way since it’s so flat out here.

The second gate is known as the Munster Gate as it is on the road to Germany and it has another drawbridge and goes out to some other houses on a little island in the middle of the canal system. You can also go out there and walk on the fortifications behind the houses. It’s a bit more overgrown and not quite as well looked after. They have an example on that side of the wooden pickets that they had on the outside of the fortifications along the water’s edge.

It took me about 40 minutes to walk all the way around to the main gate again but I wasn’t walking quickly and I stopped to take lots of photos. In some ways the surrounding countryside is prettier than the village itself and it’s good to be able to get on a higher vantage point for photos. There are also lots of birds and some cute hairy sheep around that make for nice pics. I then headed back into the buildings and towards the museums which open at 10am.

The ticket office for the museums is at number 2 which is next to the Munster Gate so you have to walk past the other museums to get to it. It’s 5.50 to get into all four of the museums and they aren’t bad. They don’t have a lot of English information though so you do just have to try and work it out. I think that some of the museums have booklets that you can buy that go through the main items in English.

The first museum shows a video about the history of the fort and the reconstruction. They have this in Dutch, German and English. I assume in summer they have set times for the showings but I just got it when I turned up as I was the only one there. It’s quite good and sets out the different sections and when they were built and why they decided to rebuild. It’s a good intro as I don’t know anything about the history of 16^th century Holland. I then headed down the street to the old barracks. This building has a museum with all the pieces that they found when they were doing the rebuilding. Much of it was found in the canals but some came from under the buildings. They have a lot of bits and pieces that were found under the toilets where they had fallen from soldiers pockets. There is also a reconstruction of what the rooms would have looked like when the barracks were built and some of the uniforms. Upstairs has some old weapons and a lot of photos of the mock battles that they hold in the fort each year. In late April/early May they have a reenactment of a battle (the specific battle varies from year to year) and a whole lot of history buffs dress up and fire cannons and stuff. It actually looks like a lot of fun. The next one is the first weekend in May 2009 if anyone is interested.

The old synagogue is just off the main square and was built in the middle of the 19^th century. The Jews had come from the East because of persecution and settled in the area and became traders. Some lived in the village at Bourtange (the fort was pretty much gone by then) and some lived in Vlagtwedde. They had quite a large group up until the war but only five returned afterwards. The synagogue is no longer used for services and has been made into a museum instead. It covers the basics of Jewish faith, the bath that is in the temple, important items in the synagogue and the history of the families in the region and what happened to them during and after the war. There isn’t any information in English but they have a booklet that you can borrow that covers the entire museum.

The final museum is only a couple of rooms on the main square and is the captain’s house. They have redone the rooms in the original house from the 17^th century. The rooms are from a later date though as they have running water and look much more 18^th century to me. He seemed to live a much better life than the boys in the barracks and even had a double bed and two fire places. There isn’t any information at this museum, you just get to look in through the glass.

The rest of the buildings in the square are used as shops (souvenirs, clocks and antiques) and restaurants. There is a little church in the back of one of the restaurants but it was locked. It’s worth just wandering around the rest of the buildings. Most are houses where people live but they have built the exteriors to match the buildings there in the 18^th century even if they are modern on the inside. There are also some that were built to match the arms stores and other things like that. I think they are open in the summer but they were all locked up when I was there.

Unfortunately, the little café was closed while I was there and just a note that the restaurant isn’t open on Monday or Tuesday during the off season either so don’t rely on being able to get lunch in the fortress. There are some more places in the rest of the village of Bourtange and there is a little shop which sells snacks and icecreams but not meals. So my plan of sitting in the sun in the square drinking a warm drink ended and I had an icecream, bought some postcards and left. I suspect that had all the shops been open I might have been able to amuse myself for another hour but decided instead to walk back to Vlagtwedde and get the bus.

The walk goes along a bike path next to the main road (handily called Vlagtweddestraat) but there is very little traffic along the main road so it’s pleasant enough. The first section along the main road through the modern section of the village isn’t all that inspiring but you rapidly get out into the countryside a bit more and while there are houses for most of the way, there is more land between them. I got to see some Dutch cows but was disappointed that they weren’t the really hairy ones that I’d seen from the train that look like muppets. I also got to see lots of miniature horses. I couldn’t see but could definitely smell the chicken farm that is by the road too. All along the path is a ditch which is full of water. The water table really is only four feet below the ground. I’m surprised that it doesn’t flood here more often.

It took about 1.5 hours to walk back to Vlagtwedde though I wasn’t rushing and I arrived with a little bit of time to spare before the next bus back to Windschoten (which was the one that I would have caught had I waited at the fortress for the bus anyway). I grabbed some rolls at the bakery on the way past (Oh I miss the Germany bakeries so much) and headed into Schoolstraat which is the street of the bus station. Then it was a matter of switching back onto the train and I was back in Groningen a little before 4pm.

There is a monastery south of Bourtange called Ter Apel which is meant to be really fabulous and if you have a car they are easy to do in the one day. It would be possible to do by bike if you stayed somewhere for the night as it’s only 20km further to the monastery. Unfortunately for those on foot or relying on buses there aren’t any that you can use to get you there on the same day during the off season. In the summer it seems that it would be possible because of the better bus services during the day during the school holidays.

I’d really recommend a trip to Bourtange if you are up this way. It’s nice to get out into the peace and quiet of the countryside (though I suspect there is less of that in the summer) and it really is lovely out there. I was lucky enough to get a gloriously sunny day even if it was still quite cold and it’s great walking out on the walls in the sunshine. It really is a star.