Qualla: Sallandse Heuvelrug National Park

Sallandse Heuvelrug National Park: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FaceMePLS from The Hague, The Netherlands, CC BY 2.0. In a country whose highest natural point south of the Wadden barely tops 320 meters, a hill of 75.5 meters above sea level qualifies as something the Dutch are willing to call a mountain - and to give a name to. The Koningsbelt is one such mountain. The Sprengenberg is another. The Holterberg, the Haarlerberg, the Hellendoornse Berg. Together they form the Sallandse Heuvelrug, a long ridge of purple heather and Scots pine in the province of Overijssel that exists because, 150,000 years ago, a glacier shoved the local sand into a pile and then went home.

Image: FaceMePLS from The Hague, The Netherlands | CC BY 2.0

Sallandse Heuvelrug National Park: What the Ice Left

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Deb Collins, CC BY 2.0. The ridge is a moraine, built during the Saalian glaciation when ice sheets reached this far south. Before they arrived, the Rhine and other rivers had laid down thick deposits of sand, gravel, and thinner clay layers across the region. The Saalian ice pushed those layers up into...

Image: Deb Collins | CC BY 2.0

Sallandse Heuvelrug National Park: The Heath Is a Human Invention

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Olnnu, CC BY-SA 3.0. Forests covered the ridge for most of the Holocene. Then the medieval population grew, and people started using the landscape the way people did. Trees came down for lumber. Sheep and goats grazed the cleared ground. Farmers cut the top layer of sod and carried it to their fields...

Image: Olnnu | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sallandse Heuvelrug National Park: The Last Korhoen

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ymblanter, CC BY-SA 4.0. The black grouse - Lyrurus tetrix, Korhoen in Dutch - holds its courtship dance, called a lek, on open heath in the cold light of early morning. The males puff up their white tail coverts and make a sound somewhere between a coo and a bubbling rasp, and they have been doing it ac...

Image: Ymblanter | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sallandse Heuvelrug National Park: What 75 Meters Buys You

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MartinD, CC BY-SA 3.0. Across 5,000 hectares - 2,700 of them inside the national park boundary south of the Nijverdal-Raalte road - the ridge is a small empire of footpaths and bike trails. The Dutch word for the experience is uitzicht, the view, and on the Heuvelrug the view is bigger than the elevati...

Image: MartinD | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sallandse Heuvelrug National Park: An Older Quiet

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gertjan Schutten, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl. Two unexpected presences mark the modern park. One is the Canadian War Cemetery near Holten, where more than 1,300 Canadian soldiers killed in the final weeks of the Second World War lie under rows of white stones - a quiet field at the edge of the heath, oriented so the rising s...

Image: Gertjan Schutten | CC BY-SA 3.0 nl