Marken

Thurday 29th  June - Guided tour of Marken

Our friends Aleid and Bouke keep their steel ketch Brandaan here and cooked us a splendid dinner on board yesterday. White asparagus which is a speciality and all sorts of other goodies washed down with copious quantities of, well you know...

Today they will give us a guided tour, ending at the supermarket for provisions.

Pedro must come too

The house were built on stilts because the village would flood regularly when this was an island in the old Zuiderzee. Now that it's on an enclosed lake the stilts have been boarded round and the space is used for storage. Aleid showed us a plaque way above our heads on the side of a house which marked the level of the floodwater in a particularly devastating flood in 1916. Just as in Zeeland the Delta Plan got the go ahead after the disaster of 1953, so here the Zuiderzee was enclosed by a dam built between 1927 and 1932. It had been thought about and planned for years but it seems it took a disaster to get the necessary legislation passed.

The fishing heritage is evident in the church. Aleid takes us in to show us all the sailing ships - one above the pulpit and several suspended around the church




See that house...?

...well by the front door is an exact copy of the house in miniature, even down to the slope of the street. There are few like this - wonder whether we'd have spotted them without Aleid.

Duty done, and shopping, so it's time for Brandaan to head out for some sailing. We asked Bouke what the wooden grid on the roof of the house behind was about - we've seen it elsewhere. He told us it's to keep the tiles on. OK

Bye Aleid, Bye Pedro!

Bye Captain Bouke!

Nice boat!!








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