Windmills Country

One always associates a windmill picture with Holland. Actually there are many other countries which equally possess similar windmills but it’s the Dutch who are able to publicise, keep and maintained a lot of the traditional windmills working. In fact there are still over a thousand working windmills in the whole of Holland. The Dutch should be grateful to all these windmills and the many thousands more that have now been replaced by electric pumps, for the windmill actually over many centuries built the country!

Holland is protected from the sea by coastal dunes and dykes, without these sea defences around a third of the country would be under water. By the 14th century Dutch windmills were in use to drain areas of the Rhine River delta. Although many of the windmill were built primarily for industrial purposes such as corm milling and saw milling, but they were also used for land drainage thus increasing amount of arable land. This was easy to do as Holland is quite flat and expansion of drained area could be done very rapidly. The number of windmill later steadily declined with the advent of electric water pumps and proper engineering of the drainage system.

But in the past 10 years, the number of windmills in the Netherlands was actually rising as there has been extensive rebuilds. One can find at least a windmill in every town. The top photo is the windmill right at the centre of Leiden. The other is the one we took while at Keukenhof.