Qualla: De Marne

De Marne: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Aikep, CC BY-SA 3.0. Spanish tradition gives the statue of the Virgin Mary a white handkerchief in her hand to catch her tears. At the hermitage in Warfhuizen, in what used to be the municipality of De Marne, the practice has been adapted into a strange and lovely transaction. Pilgrims bring a new white handkerchief. They give it to the hermit, who swaps it with the one the Virgin has been holding. The used handkerchief - now touched by the statue's hand - is given to someone who is sick or lonely, or carried by a student to a difficult exam. The hermitage sits in a village of a few hundred people, in farmland that used to be tidal flats, in a former municipality that no longer exists.

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Image: User:Aikep | CC BY-SA 3.0

De Marne: A Municipality Lasted 29 Years

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hardscarf, CC BY-SA 3.0. De Marne was created in 1990 by merging four smaller municipalities - Eenrum, Kloosterburen, Leens, and Ulrum - into a single administrative unit with about 10,000 inhabitants spread across 21 villages and 240 square kilometres of the northwestern Groningen coast. The local gover...

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Image: Hardscarf | CC BY-SA 3.0

De Marne: Salt Water Turned to Pasture

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elgaard, CC BY-SA 4.0. The most dramatic change to the De Marne landscape in living memory happened in 1969, when the Lauwerszee - a large salt-water inlet of the Wadden Sea - was sealed off from the open sea by a dike. The result is the Lauwersmeer, a 90 square kilometre body of water that began as a ...

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Image: Elgaard | CC BY-SA 4.0

De Marne: The Wierde Villages

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Before dikes, the only way to live in this country was to build upward. The Frisians who settled the Groningen coast piled clay into artificial dwelling mounds called terps (or wierden in the local dialect), and built their houses and churches on top. When the North Sea storms ca...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

De Marne: Maren and Church Organs

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sjouker, CC BY-SA 3.0. De Marne is laced with maren - narrow waterways that twist through the countryside, originally cut for drainage and now used for recreational sailing and canoeing. The municipality marketed itself as a network of footpaths, cyclepaths, and water routes connecting all the villages...

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Image: Sjouker | CC BY-SA 3.0

De Marne: People Who Came From Here

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stef Bilo, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sicco Mansholt was born in Ulrum in 1908. As Dutch minister of agriculture after the war, then as European commissioner for agriculture from 1958 onward, he designed the Common Agricultural Policy that still shapes European farming subsidies six decades later. He served briefly a...

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Image: Stef Bilo | CC BY-SA 3.0