Oegstgeest and the woolly rhino?
Hopefully you have all been enjoying some sunshine and the abundance of flowers and greenery Oegstgeest is justifiedly proud of. Walking around the well-tended streets and gardens of these luxurious neighbourhoods, it may be hard to imagine the area we live in was once very much like a vast tundra. But if we stretch our minds a mere 100.000 years back in time, we get to the final part of the last ice age that caused land ice to form up to the Elbe and glaciers and thick layers of land ice to deplete the oceans of water, so that sea levels had dropped more than 100 meters and shallow coastal areas like those around the North Sea had fallen dry. So the place we now live in had then a tundra climate: mostly cold and dry, with summers that hardly got any warmer than 6 degrees Centrigrade and winters way below freezing point (some of you, originating from warmer climes, may be under the impression that the Dutch climate is still like that only with perpetual rain added as bonus - however, that is not correct.)
At that time in prehistory there were very few plants and hardly any trees to speak of, basically just mosses and herbs. There were animals though, like mammoths and the woolly rhinoceros, more than one for sure, but whether they called themselves rhinoceroses or rhinoceri, we may never know... (I am not making this up - the information is found in an interesting, albeit not too recent, publication of Museam Boerhaave, called 'Monsters van Rijnland', intended to explain how water management was set up and run of old - a vital undertaking in these wet and low parts...) At any rate, at some point in time there was sufficient global warming for the ice age to end and for climatic conditions to improve in order to make this area eventually habitable for more flora and fauna, including the human variety.
Since then, human ingenuity has produced the bicycle, among other things. Bike rides through the polders or dunes can provide excellent opportunity to find evidence of the intricate water management systems that to this day keep our feet dry and our towns and roads as well. In various periods of the 20th century quite a few canals, moors, ponds and ditches were paved over to make way for roads, parking areas, housing or sometimes ill-advised municipal developments (as some home-owners with cellars have discovered). Lately new ideas have been launched for re-opening canals and for creating more ponds, wetlands or water ways to help keep us all dry in the future. Personally I think it would be marvellous to change the Terweeweg into the Terwetering canal and thereby add a picturesque Venetian touch to our already charming environment - anyone for promoting this?
- 27 mei 2010
