I am up North this weekend, in the Dutch province of Drenthe, feeding my interest in matters megalithic by inspecting the hunebedden, the huge 5000-year-old stone structures which are dotted around the province. In fact, Drenthe has no less than 52 of them, and there are another two in Groningen; in the whole of the rest of the Netherlands there is one (1) surviving megalithic structure, a tomb near Maastricht.
Herman Clerinx, in his book Een Palais voor de Doden, tallies twelve dolmens and menhirs in Belgium, and one in Luxembourg. (I have been to all of them.) This means that 76% of all the surviving megalithic monuments in the three Benelux countries are in Drenthe, otherwise one of the least remarkable Dutch provinces.
Even though the hunebedden are not that different from each other (which itself is interesting; compare the variations among the Belgian monoliths, and their contrast with Wéris), they are still pretty spectacular. We looked at six of them today, which is more than 10% of the total number, and unusually for this blog, I’m going to lead with my video reaction to each one, since photographs just don’t capture the majestic structure.
D19 and D20
Each of the surviving hunebedden has been given a code number which you can actually put into your GPS. Several of them come in pairs. The first two that we looked at, like many of the others, were in a little glade off a side road, in this case near the village of Drouwen.
The farther off of the two, D20, has a ring of external stones around the entire structure.
D19 has a small entry port which I spotted after shooting the video.
A stern notice warned against climbing on them, and also asked visitors to respect that this is a place of human burial.
D27
The largest of the hunebedden is in the grounds of the Hunebed Centre, which was well worth visiting.
The only photo I took here was of the entrance portal which again I found interesting.
It will be apparent by now that it was a very wet day.
D10
This was the smallest of the hunebedden that we visited today.
A bijou affair among the sand dunes.
Some kids had built a den nearby.
D17 and D18
We stopped for lunch at an Albert Heijn supermarket and found signs to more hunebedden beside the church. It was now raining pretty firmly.
I was so excited by finding D17 by the church that I did not realise that D18 was right beside it.
D18 is much more satisfyingly complete.
I had planned a much longer itinerary, but we had other things on our agenda, and I felt we had seen a representative sample of the hunebedden, so we drew a line there and moved on.
At first sight, the hunebedden may all look like random jumbles of stones, but it does not take very long to appreciate that each of them has its own special grace in its own special place; that there is a reason why they were built there in that way, even if we cannot know it.
The conventional theory is that they were all covered with earth which has eroded away over the years. I find this very difficult to believe; I think when you cover something with earth, in general the earth stays there, as with the Irish court cairns (and passange tombs such as Newgrange) and the French allées couvertes. I am sure that the gaps between the stones were covered over originally, out of respect for the dead, but I reckon it was with more perishable material: cloth, or straw, or a combination.
Shirshendu Sengupta has written a brilliant guide to visiting all 54 of the hunebedden, grading them as “Must-See”, “Should-See”, “Could-See” and “Wouldn’t-See”. We didn’t even get around all of his Must-Sees today, but I’ll keep it bookmarked for a future occasion.
Drenthe is remote (by Dutch standards) and doesn’t have a lot else to offer (but more on that anon). However if you have time and energy, the hunebedden are all free to visit, and instantly connect you with our ancestors of 200 generations ago. And apparently there are many more, just over the German border.