Surprises in 'het Hogeland'

The area known as the Highland (Het Hogeland) has caught our attention for a quarter of a century. We fell in love with this part of northern Groningen, where there is space between the villages which are surrounded by landscape and nothing is standing in the way. The nice part of this is that you have a good view and wide view from afar. Even the slightest difference in the height of the land, every bump, so to speak, is visible in this plain landscape. It makes it quite easy to see what we call ‘frustrated’ mounds, the abandoned mounds where buildings are no longer on top of them. Churches and farms were built on these mounds, making this one of the oldest cultural landscapes in the Netherlands. The mounds were made by raising the land with soil from the coast, with manure and waste. In this way people were safe from the frequent floods of the nearby North Sea. Those floods have left their mark in this landscape, traces left by nature but also by the people trying to control nature. 

After the Saint-Marcellus and other floods in the Middle Ages, men chose to put dikes next to the Reitdiep river, which Jan likes to call the ‘Nile of the north’. A part of the river called Hunze became very small and is now called Kromme Raken, which you could translate as ‘Crooked Fall’. Abelstok is the name of a pumping station and the bridge over Kromme Raken bears its name. The bridge is called Abelstoksterstil where ‘til’ means ‘bridge’ in the local dialect for Groningen. There is a rhyme by Tonnis van Duinen in the ‘Groninger Volksalmanak’ (Almanac) from 1839 that explains the names in this area. ‘A man called Abel bet he could jump over the water using a pole (which is ‘stok ‘in Dutch). He jumped so far that everybody lost sight of him. The people then cried out: ‘'Wee, o, wee! (the village called Wehe). But Abel was all right and to make that obvious for everybody he blew his horn (the village Den Hoorn). The people understood and quite relieved said 'the man is here again' (the village Mensingeweer).’ As early as the 16th century Abelstok is mentioned in a document concerning the maintenance of Kromme Raken and that could be known as ‘abetenstok’.

We wander through the woods of Abelstok to the south to the hamlet Klein Maarslag. You can only see a slight rise in the landscape surrounded by trees and a hedge, and you can’t imagine it was once an entire village. What remains is only the old graveyard with about 20 gravestones and a couple of ‘bedframes’ as we call them (metal fences surrounding a single or group of gravestones).

What we know from the excavations by the famous professor Van Giffen in 1953 is that the graveyard is much older than the church that once stood here. Both the church and the village were torched by troops from Friesland in 1584. Van Giffen uncovered quite a lot of remains of the old church in the ground. The plan of the church has been made visible by using different stones in the ground for the various phases in which it had been built. Alas, it is now covered with shells, but you can still see the plan. The church was demolished in 1888 because of its frailty and all the material was used for other buildings. The mount was removed for the greater part in the 19th and 20th centuries (quite common in this area), as the soil was very fertile and therefore worth quite a bit of money. The graves that remained were just below two metres higher than the surroundings. These last six remaining houses were then demolished between 1850 and 1930. 

The tracks of the past are still clear on the graveyard. They say that these gravestones might be the oldest ones in open air in the Netherlands. You can find all kinds of symbols of death here: a pelican feeding her chicks with her own blood, weeping willows, skulls, sandglasses, scales, sunbeams, and the Lamb of God. The oldest stone is dated 1609 and it was thought to have been lying inside the church. The gravestone of Kornelius Wiersema, born in 1550, is just readable but difficult to understand:

A slightly more readable gravestone is from 1663 with a link to Maarslag:

The so-called corpse-lane on which the funeral processions would walk, is still an existing path and brings you to Groot Maarslag. This is an existing hamlet on a mount (three metres higher than the surroundings) on the old riverbank of the Hunze with a few houses situated on a circular road, often called oxen hallway. This is the old road that was used to bring cattle to the land.

You can experience the height in this flat countryside if you walk to the top. If you go a bit further you will face another surprise: the winery Vineyard Hof van 't Hogeland. Elma Middel came here in 1994 with her horses. The earthquake in Huisinge in 2012 resulted in her house becoming unmarketable and her pension plan vanished into thin air. Her property had to make money in a different way, and she had the idea of starting a vineyard, even though she had no experience whatsoever. There are two kinds of grapes on the vineyard, the Johanniter and the Solaris. Elma Middel lets nature take its course and doesn’t use any pesticides. Grass grows underneath the vines and the sea wind keeps the mildew away. You can taste the fruits of this area in fresh white wines. 

We return back to the woods of Abelstok. When we had just reached the woods, we turned to the right (heading east). Further in the woods we noticed that these trees are not the trees you would expect in woods in this countryside (where there a very few woods). It happens to be an old orchard of fruit trees that has grown wild. Orchards are uncommon in this flat and windy part of the country, and one would only find them near a farm. We sensed immediately that something special has occurred here. 

On this day in spring the twisted branches of the old apple and pear trees remind us of one of the paintings by Vincent van Gogh. He painted blooming almond trees against a blue sky. He made this painting in 1890 for his brother Theo and his wife to celebrate the birth of their son Vincent Willem. Just as in the painting, you look at these branches and the blossoms from below. To be frank you can’t see the blossoms as well as on the painting as the trees grow up to five metres high and because they have grown wild, the branches don’t bare that many blossoms. But the branches really resemble the painting. 

It is great to wander around here in all of the seasons: in winter to see the bare branches, in spring to admire the blossoms, in summer to see the fruit grow and in autumn to pick the fruit or to find it laying on the ground among the fallen leaves. If we walk in these woods, we always wonder how this orchard of apples and pear trees ever started in this bare countryside in Groningen. 

This area is called the woods of Abelstok, and is not managed locally but by Staatsbosbeheer, a state organisation. In 1923 the orchard of apple and pear trees was planted by Johannes Petrus Bos from the village Wehe-Den Hoorn. Mr. Bos had an agricultural farm in the village, but he wanted a fruit orchard in Abelstok to form part of his nursery called Morning Sun (‘de Morgenzon’). Mr. Bos died in 1961 and six years later his heir and nephew Jan sold the aged orchard to Carel Klijnhout (1912-1983) from The Hague. Mr. Klijnhout was an advisor in the field of agricultural politics and economics and published frequently on those subjects. He thought that the time was right for organic biodynamic fruit and continued the company and the orchard. Unfortunately, at that time, unsprayed fruit was not yet profitable. He went into financial difficulty and had practical problems after the law seized his goods and put a claim on the holder of his mortgage which was a pension fund for bakers in Groningen. There were other people interested in the organic fruit, and they were a part of a movement called Kabouters, the Provos, from Amsterdam. They formed a commune on the farm in 1971, at that time with owner's permission. They sold the fruit in Amsterdam and to shops with organic products. 

Abelstok attracted young people from the west to work in the orchard. The local people thought them quite odd and they talked a lot about those long-haired boys from the west working on Abelstok. The young group of workers were described in a local newspaper (het Nieuwsblad, 22 July 1977) as 'a macrobiotic commune existing of constantly changing groups of people with different nationalities'. Mr. Klijnhout was not very pleased with the commune and tried to get the group to leave his property. The municipality declared the house uninhabitable, and the now-squatters were removed from the land. Mr. Klijnhout chose to let the orchard overgrow, to let it become a natural point of rest in a landscape of totally agricultural used land. A volunteer of the Foundation of Groningen Landscape lived in an on-site caravan to keep poachers and thieves away. 

The farm was destroyed in a fire (het Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, 14 October 1977). Alas the ruins of buildings are no longer visible, and they can only be found in old pictures. Only in 1978, after the legal trials had finished, did Mr. Klijnhout obtain total ownership of Abelstok again. In 1980 he turned the property over to the Foundation of Groningen Landscape. They added woods which led to the woods of Abelstok as we know it today. 

If you follow the edge of the woods on the eastside, you will find a quite unusual bridge over a small creek. The bridge is made as a picnic bench. A nice reason to take a break. This spot gives you a good view of the crooked trees and the landscape behind it. The bench also gives you a reason to stay a bit longer, chat with others and have a picnic in these fairy-tale woods. If you return to the pumping station, you will have ‘read’ several landscapes during your 2km walk. 

2022