The Achterhoek
In the quiet eastern corner of Gelderland, a landscape of moated castles, book-filled market squares and ancient hedgerow country has been waiting patiently for you to arrive.
An introduction to The Achterhoek
There is a particular quality of quiet in the Achterhoek that takes a little time to recognise for what it is. Not emptiness — the fields and lanes are full of life — but depth. The eastern edge of Gelderland sits in a fold of the Netherlands that most visitors sail straight past on their way to Arnhem or the Veluwe, and the region has, over centuries, arranged itself into something that asks to be met on its own terms: slowly, by bicycle, preferably with no particular agenda beyond the next bend in an oak-lined lane. Achterhoek translates literally as “back corner,” and the name has stuck precisely because it tells the truth. This is the far country, and it is lovelier for it.
The landscape itself is the first thing to absorb. Geographers call it coulisselandschap — a theatre-curtain countryside, in which ancient wood banks, hedgerows and long avenues of pedunculate oak divide the land into intimate, human-scaled rooms. The effect is unlike anything in the flatter, more open Netherlands to the west: you are perpetually moving through a green corridor and emerging into a clearing, only to enter another. Scattered across this scenery, as though a child had pressed them carefully into clay, are the moated castles and country estates of the region’s old landowning families — eight of them within easy cycling distance of the small market town of Vorden alone. The Achterhoek was always prosperous enough to build beautifully, and proud enough not to demolish what it built.
The towns, though unhurried, have genuine characters. Bredevoort, barely a village in population, has reinvented itself as a book town in the tradition of Hay-on-Wye, its gabled houses holding antiquarian and second-hand shops that spill titles onto the pavement on fine Sundays. Groenlo carries its seventeenth-century military history with understated pride and once gave its medieval name, Grolle, to a beer that is now known the world over. Winterswijk, the region’s largest and most easterly town, sits close against the German border with a fine Sunday market, remarkable cycling country, and a geological landscape so unusual that the fields around it yield Triassic fossils. Bronckhorst, on the IJssel’s western edge, makes the improbable claim of being the smallest city in the Netherlands and does so with complete sincerity.
What the Achterhoek asks of you is not much: a few days, a bicycle, and the willingness to follow a lane simply because it looks promising. In return it offers a version of the Netherlands that most visitors never suspect — layered, pastoral, quietly beautiful, and remarkably easy to have almost entirely to yourself.
In this email
- The ring of castles around Vorden and the great estate of Hackfort
- The coulisselandschap: oak lanes, wood banks and the scholtenboeren farms
- Bredevoort, the book town on the Berkel
- Groenlo: a siege, a Spanish wall and the birth of Grolsch
- Winterswijk: geology, raised bogs and a legendary Sunday market
- A three-day itinerary and where to stay
Best time to visit: Late April through early October brings the coulisselandschap to full, layered green and suits cycling perfectly; May and June offer bluebell-carpeted woodland edges and the best light. October is quietly spectacular, the oak lanes turning copper.
Travel logistics: Trains run from Amsterdam Centraal to Doetinchem (around two hours, one change at Utrecht or Arnhem), which puts you at the heart of the region; onward local buses and, crucially, hire bicycles are available in most towns. A car is useful for the remoter estates but not essential — the knooppunten cycling network covers the entire Achterhoek with numbered junctions, and a map costs a few euros at any VVV.
The ring of castles: Vorden and its estates
The small town of Vorden, sitting serenely in the middle of the Achterhoek, is the starting point for one of the most quietly extraordinary cycling routes in the Netherlands. Within a radius of roughly fifteen kilometres, eight medieval castles and country estates survive in varying states of inhabitation and restoration — a concentration without parallel in the Dutch countryside. The Kasteelroute van Vorden joins them by lane and track, and a leisurely day on a bicycle will reveal, one by one, moated towers rising above the oak canopy, wrought-iron gates set into old brick walls and gravel drives disappearing into mature parkland.
The jewel of the circuit is Kasteel Hackfort, a fifteenth-century moated castle managed today by Geldersch Landschap en Kasteelen — the foundation that looks after many of Gelderland’s historic properties. Hackfort sits in a broad estate of old-growth woodland and meadow that functions as important habitat for birds of prey, including the hobby and the marsh harrier. The castle itself is not open to visitors, but the estate grounds and the views across the moat from the lane are reason enough to make the detour, particularly in the long horizontal light of a summer evening. Kasteel Vorden in the town itself is similarly private but presents a handsome face to the world: a compact moated structure of warm brick, its reflection doubling it in still water. Vorden’s café terraces on the small market square make an excellent place to sit with a coffee and consider where the lane will take you next.
Further along the route, Huis Verwolde near Lochum is more manor house than fortress — a stately eighteenth-century country seat whose formal gardens and lime-tree avenues speak of a landed confidence that has softened pleasingly with age. The house occasionally opens for guided visits; check ahead, because the painted interiors and period furniture are well worth an hour of your time. What strikes you most on the Kasteelroute, riding from property to property through the wood-banked lanes, is not the grandeur of any individual building but the cumulative effect of a region that simply never stopped caring about its landscape. Each estate feeds imperceptibly into the next, connected by the same ancient hedgerows and the same rooks crying above the same oaks they have used for generations.
The coulisselandschap: a landscape like no other
To understand the Achterhoek properly, you need to spend an hour simply sitting in it. Find a gate on a farm track somewhere between Vorden and Zelhem, lean a bicycle against a post, and look. The land before you will be divided into a series of irregular green panels by ranks of old oak trees growing on raised earth banks — the houtwallen, planted over centuries to mark boundaries, shelter livestock and provide coppiced timber. These banks and the lanes between them create the coulisse effect: a landscape of theatrical wings receding into the distance, each one slightly different in tone, the whole thing in constant slow movement as the wind combs through the canopy overhead.
This is the Nationaal Landschap Winterswijk, one of twenty nationally designated landscapes in the Netherlands, and it survives here in a form that has largely disappeared elsewhere. The hedgerow enclosures were once common across the sandy eastern soils of the Netherlands and Germany, but the twentieth century’s agricultural rationalisation removed most of them. In the Achterhoek a combination of small landholdings, local pride and the region’s relative distance from the main axes of Dutch agricultural intensification preserved them, and today the wood banks and their associated wildlife — purple hairstreak butterflies, tawny owls, roe deer, field mice moving along the bank edges at dusk — form the ecosystem that holds the whole landscape together.
Scattered through this scenery are the scholtenboerderijen: the grand farmhouses of the old Scholten class, the prosperous farmer-magistrates who dominated Achterhoek society for centuries. These men were not nobility in the formal sense but wielded considerable local authority, and their farms reflected it — substantial T-shaped or L-shaped buildings of half-timbered construction or later brick, often with carriage gates, dovecotes and the remains of moats. Several survive around Zelhem, Hengelo (Gld.) and the villages east of Doetinchem, some converted to holiday accommodation or restaurants, others still working farms whose owners maintain the old buildings with evident care. Spotting them from the lane — the broad thatch or red-tiled roofs, the overhanging eaves, the old oak beams — becomes an enjoyable game as you cycle deeper into the region.
Bredevoort: a town that read itself back to life
There is something quietly triumphant about Bredevoort. A fortified border town whose strategic importance evaporated with the peace treaties of the seventeenth century, it spent the following two centuries settling into a comfortable provincial obscurity, its double moat and grid of gabled streets perfectly preserved largely because nobody had pressing reason to change them. Then, in 1993, inspired by Richard Booth’s experiment at Hay-on-Wye, it reinvented itself as a boekenstad — a book town — and the transformation has been, by any measure, a success.
Today the streets of Bredevoort’s compact historic centre hold a constellation of antiquarian, second-hand and specialist bookshops, their windows dense with spines in Dutch, German, English and French. The shops range from the intimate to the labyrinthine, some occupying old merchants’ houses where the books have colonised every room and staircase, others set up in converted outbuildings with the cheerful informality that characterises the best of the genre. On the first Sunday of the month from April to October, a book market fills the Markt square with stalls, and the town takes on a festive, bookish air that draws collectors and casual browsers alike from across the eastern Netherlands and over the nearby German border.
Beyond the books, Bredevoort is simply a beautiful small Dutch town of the kind that rewards an afternoon’s unhurried exploration. The double moat, now peaceful and duck-frequented, still rings the old inner town. The medieval street plan survives essentially intact, the houses presenting a pleasing variety of gable styles — step, neck and bell — in the mellow brick that the region favoured. The Koppelkerk, a twin-nave church with a particularly atmospheric interior, stands at the centre of it all, as it has done since the fifteenth century. Sit on the terrace of one of the small cafés on the Markt after your browsing and you will understand why the people who found this place decided to fill it with books rather than let it moulder quietly away.
Groenlo: siege lines, Spanish walls and the birth of Grolsch
Groenlo wears its history with the matter-of-fact confidence of a town that has genuinely been fought over. During the Eighty Years’ War, the small fortified settlement of Grolle, as it was then known, changed hands between Spanish and Dutch forces with exhausting regularity, and the Siege of Grolle in 1627 — in which Frederik Hendrik of Orange finally captured the town from the Habsburgs after a prolonged and costly campaign — was celebrated in the Dutch Republic as a major strategic victory. A section of the original Spanish defensive earthwork, the Spaanse Dam, still survives in the landscape just outside the town: a grassy rampart that you can walk along, incongruously peaceful now, trying to imagine the noise and smoke of what occurred here four centuries ago.
The story of the siege is told engagingly in Museum Grol, which uses the town’s military past to illuminate the wider drama of the Dutch struggle for independence. The museum handles its material with intelligence rather than triumphalism, and the models, maps and period artefacts give a vivid sense of how a small provincial town became, briefly, an object of European strategic significance. Groenlo’s market square and the surrounding streets still carry the bones of the old fortified town beneath later building, and a walk around the inner moat gives you the measure of what was once defended here.
Then there is the beer. The brewery that would become Grolsch was established in Grolle in 1615, making it one of the oldest in the Netherlands. The name, a Germanicised version of the town’s medieval name, became one of the most recognisable in European brewing, the swing-top beugelfles bottle turning heads on export markets long before the brand became a global property. The brewery itself relocated to Enschede in 2004, but Groenlo reclaimed the connection with characteristic regional stubbornness, and you can learn the full story of how a small-town brewer became an unlikely ambassador for Dutch craftsmanship at the local heritage centre. Raise a glass on the terrace accordingly — the town has earned it.
Winterswijk: fossils, bogs and the finest Sunday market in the east
Winterswijk presents itself as a regular Dutch market town — a pleasant main square, a handsome church, good shops, a feeling of mild prosperity — and then quietly reveals itself to be something considerably more interesting. The country around it, designated as part of the Nationaal Landschap Winterswijk, contains some of the most geologically unusual terrain in the Netherlands: outcrops of Triassic limestone pushed to the surface by ancient earth movements, visible in the fields and stream beds around the villages of Miste and Corle to the south of the town. In these outcrops, patient visitors find fossil stromatolites, ancient algal mats preserved in the rock, and, more excitingly, the fossilised footprints of Triassic reptiles — ichnofossils that pre-date the dinosaurs and make this unremarkable-looking farmland into a window onto a world two hundred and forty million years old.
North of the town, the Korenburgerveen offers a complete change of mood and geology: a raised peat bog of considerable size and ecological importance, its surface a vast, sodden carpet of sphagnum moss, cotton grass and sundew, traversed by a boardwalk that takes you to the heart of a landscape that has barely changed since the last ice age. Dragonflies hang above the dark pools. Curlews call from the open bog. On a grey morning with low cloud sitting on the moss, the Korenburgerveen feels genuinely ancient and slightly otherworldly — a reminder that the Netherlands contains far more than the landscapes its tourism industry tends to show.
The Sunday market in Winterswijk, meanwhile, is simply one of the best reasons to arrange your weekend around the town. Running weekly from spring through autumn, it fills the Markt and several surrounding streets with stallholders selling cheese, smoked meats, fresh bread, plants, antiques, clothing and the general agreeable miscellany of a proper working market. It draws people from across the Achterhoek and from the German towns just over the border, and by mid-morning the café terraces around the square are busy with the particular satisfaction of people who have already found something worth buying before eleven o’clock. Time your visit accordingly.
A three-day itinerary
Day one: Arrive in Doetinchem, ride to Vorden. Collect a hire bicycle and head northwest on the lanes towards Vorden, following the knooppunten signs. Stop at Bronckhorst on the IJssel — the smallest city in the Netherlands is effectively a single street of historic houses above the river, and a coffee stop at the small café there is non-negotiable. Continue to Vorden by early afternoon, check into your accommodation and spend the evening cycling the first loop of the Kasteelroute. Dinner in Vorden.
Day two: The full Kasteelroute and on to Bredevoort. Rise early and complete the castle circuit at a gentle pace, stopping at the Hackfort estate for a walk in the grounds before the day-trippers arrive. The full loop is around forty kilometres, manageable by early afternoon. From Vorden, ride southeast on the back lanes through the coulisselandschap towards Aalten and Bredevoort — the route through Hengelo and Zelhem is particularly fine. Arrive in Bredevoort in time to browse the bookshops before they close, and stay overnight.
Day three: Groenlo and Winterswijk. Head south to Groenlo in the morning — it is an easy and pleasant ride through the typical Achterhoek landscape. Visit Museum Grol, walk the Spaanse Dam, take a late breakfast on the square. Continue east to Winterswijk for the afternoon: explore the Korenburgerveen on the boardwalk, then reward yourself with a long terrace dinner as the day cools. If your visit falls on a Sunday, reverse days two and three to catch the Winterswijk market at its best.
Where to stay
The Achterhoek has more accommodation on working farms and converted estates than almost anywhere else in the Netherlands, and staying in one of these is by far the most atmospheric choice. Several of the old scholtenboerderijen offer bed-and-breakfast or self-catering apartments in converted outbuildings, and waking to the sound of the coulisselandschap rather than a hotel breakfast service sets the tone for a day’s cycling perfectly. Look around Vorden, Zelhem, Hengelo (Gld.) and the villages south of Doetinchem for farm stays; book early in summer, as local regulars return year after year.
For those who prefer a hotel, Doetinchem has the region’s most complete range of accommodation and is a practical base if you are travelling by car or want a central hub for day rides. Winterswijk offers several good mid-range options within walking distance of the market square, and the town’s position in the eastern Achterhoek makes it an excellent base for exploring both the coulisselandschap and the geological landscape. In Bredevoort, a handful of small bed-and-breakfasts in historic houses put you within steps of the bookshops and the evening quiet of the moat — hard to improve upon if timing permits.
In closing
The Achterhoek does not announce itself. It has no single famous sight to serve as a headline, no single image that travels well on social media, no particular moment at which it demands your attention. What it has instead is consistency: a consistent beauty of landscape, a consistent quality of historical layering, and a consistent sense that the people who live here find it a perfectly good place to be and see no reason to make a fuss about it. That last quality, in particular, is one of the most attractive things a region can possess.
Spend three days cycling its lanes between the castle estates, sleeping in a converted farmhouse under the same oaks the Scholtens planted two centuries ago, and you will understand why this back corner of Gelderland keeps drawing visitors back — not dramatically, not noisily, but with the quiet certainty of a place that knows exactly what it is.
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