Missing Land 03 | 70×140 cm

Description

Inspiration

The Missing Landscape

Country estates, country residences of wealthy city dwellers, played an important role in the spatial development of the Westland. From the beginning of the Golden Age until well into the nineteenth century there were numerous of these throughout the region, which left their mark on the local property and power relations, infrastructure and land use. Of the more than a hundred country estates that were located in this region in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, virtually none have been preserved in the landscape. The observant visitor will recognize here and there a fence, a ditch or an allotment pattern that recalls a former country residence, and we also encounter references to the former pleasure grounds in the names of roads, streets and neighbourhoods. But there is not much left to see of the wide, open and picturesque agricultural landscape of the Westland, which city dwellers appreciated so much. It has become, as it were, a ‘missing landscape’.

Nowadays the Westland is a densely built-up area with a lot of greenhouse horticulture and business parks. However, this is a fairly recent development, although horticulture already has ancient roots in this area.

In the Westland they mainly appeared along the inner dune edge and along levees. […]

The approximately one hundred estates that were located in the Westland in 1712 had been established since the end of the sixteenth century. Country estates were created throughout the region: both at the foot of the dunes and on the clay areas and along the banks of the watercourses in the peat area.

When townspeople in this region settled in country estates, they used that space to create sweeping views. Several poems and descriptions praise the views from the country estates. […] An artificial mountain was often a solution for those who wanted to enjoy a view in the flat polders. 

At the end of the eighteenth century, Lieve van Ollefen, in his description of ‘s-Gravenzande, mentioned ‘the various mountains made by art, of which one sees in the sea’. […] One could see from the hills an alternating scene of land and water and the traffic over both.

The country estates along the dunes in particular were part of an estate, which also included large areas of dune soil. As early as the late seventeenth century, these were excavated to improve clay soil elsewhere in the Westland for horticulture. The excavated areas were then used as woodland or pasture. Forest could serve as a first crop to create good horticultural soil, which must have been one of the considerations for planting trees.

Sand was mainly extracted in the dune region near Loosduinen, Monster and ‘s-Gravenzande and sailed inland in sand barges. […] Westerbaen leased the Black Dunes from 1651. These were so-called blades, remnants of old dunes. He used them to feed sheep:

“In these blades, am also tenant of his Hoogheyd,
That with mine maeck a ruymen sheep drift
And my builder serves (although it is maer duyn and cliff)
To sustain greater Oyen numbers.”

This type of dune reclamation occurred in many places along the Dutch and Zeeland coast. […] After the excavation, the land was parceled out and used as agricultural land. The farms on it gradually took on the function of country houses, with more and more forests being planted.

From ‘Buitenplaatsen in het Westland’ by Martin van den Broeke et al.

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