Winding through the Kinderdijk Windmills

Finally! I was going to get to see actual windmills. Growing up in Texas I’d

Several of the windmills

seen windmills all of my life; those wimpy little things with tiny blades that pumped water into the cattle tanks, or even for household use. However, the day I heard the story of the boy with his finger in the dike and saw the pictures that went with it, I wanted to see a ‘real’ windmill. Later in high school I read Don Quixote, and again, there were ‘real’ windmills. I’d been to the Netherlands previously, but never visited any windmills – this was my chance!






The day we docked near Kinderdijk the weather was unsettled; it rained, blew, and the sun shone. Our guide, a local science teacher who

L to R: Mechanism to turn windmill, Windmill

volunteered as a tour leader, was actually wearing wooden shoes! And out ahead of us were windmills, real windmills! Today the sails were not open, so the mills weren’t spinning. This group of 19 massive windmills were built between 1738 and 1740 to keep water out of the polder, a piece of low-lying land reclaimed from the sea or from a river and protected by dikes. This is the largest concentration of old windmills in the Netherlands; the mills and the associated village have been listed as national monuments since 1993. They were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997.

Kinderdijk polder lies at the confluence of the Lek and Noord rivers and

L to R: Gears, Sitting room

began having water issues in the 1200s. Large canals were dug to get rid of the excess water but, the drained soil began setting, with the river level rising as sand was deposited. This worked for a few centuries, but eventually more technology was needed to keep the water out. The windmills were used to pump out the water without depleting the soil by using a reservoir and a series of locks. Some of the windmills are still being used for this purpose, today, but modern pumping stations are also in place. Although some of the windmills are only for tourists to visit, others still house families. At one time there were as many as 30 children going to school in one of the windmills. While they are large, or at least the blades are, there doesn’t seem to be enough room in the mills to house that many wiggling bodies and teach them anything. Another feature of the mill was a two part door. This was instituted to keep the people living in the mill safe from the swinging blades. Not only do the blades spin, but they also swivel around the body of the mill; stepping into these flying blades is fatal. All in all the windmills met my expectations; they were larger than I had anticipated and moved in an unexpected manner.

Now back to the wooden shoes…Our guide told us that until he went to public school he had no other type of shoes. These were hand carved

Wooden shoes

and had to be re-carved as the child grew. They weren’t those prettily painted shoes you see in pictures, but just raw wood. So was it thick socks that kept his feet warm? Actually not. He said that the heat generated by his feet warmed the wood and kept him warm; in the summer, the shoes were cool. I’m not at all sure I believe that. Socks were worn inside the mill; shoes were only worn outside. When he got into first grade the other children made fun of his clogs, so his parents put him in less traditional footwear.

L to R: Geese and goslings, Log bike rack

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