Qualla: Aylvapoldermolen

Aylvapoldermolen: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Quistnix Original uploader was Quistnix at nl.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.5. On the night of 9 November 1959, the old Aylvapoldermolen burned to the ground. It had pumped water from the Aylvapolder - the first polder reclaimed in Friesland, drained in 1680 - since 1827. After the fire, the field where it had stood went quiet. A small Frisian village without its mill is a strange thing, like a clock face missing its minute hand. For thirty years the absence settled in. Then, in the 1990s, the people of Burgwerd decided they wanted their mill back. The mill they ended up with had never lived in Burgwerd at all.

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Image: Quistnix Original uploader was Quistnix at nl.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 2.5

Aylvapoldermolen: A Polder Older Than the Mill

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RomkeHoekstra, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Aylvapolder is older than almost anything else around it. Drained in 1680, it was the first true polder in Friesland - a stretch of low farmland ringed by dikes and kept dry only as long as the pumps kept running. For a century and a half it was drained by hand-cranked Archim...

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Image: RomkeHoekstra | CC BY-SA 4.0

Aylvapoldermolen: The Mill That Moved

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RomkeHoekstra, CC BY-SA 4.0. Fifty kilometers north, in the village of Hallum, a different smock mill had been turning since 1846. Local people knew it as the Vijfhuistermolen or the Hoekstermolen. It had been carefully restored in 1964 and again in 1971, and in 1976 it passed to Stichting De Fryske Mole, th...

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Image: RomkeHoekstra | CC BY-SA 4.0

Aylvapoldermolen: Achtkante Grondzeiler

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Quistnix at nl.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.5. What stands in Burgwerd today is what the Dutch call an achtkante grondzeiler - an eight-sided ground-sailer, a smock mill whose sails sweep close enough to the earth that a person standing nearby can almost touch them when they pass. The brick base is a single story; the thatche...

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Image: Quistnix at nl.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 2.5

Aylvapoldermolen: Saved Twice

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Quistnix at nl.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.5. The Aylvapoldermolen has now been saved twice from fire - once by being absent, and once by sprinklers. After the 1959 burning of the original mill, the rebuilders fitted the relocated Vijfhuistermolen with an automatic sprinkler system, an unusual precaution for a Rijksmonument-...

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Image: Quistnix at nl.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 2.5