It started at the Monumentenwacht with the inspection and maintenance of churches. But a whole list of monuments has now been added. In total, the club in Drenthe now has 1250 subscribers where they come regularly. “Mills, farms, churches, towers, but also burial mounds, entrenchments. It’s a whole variety of objects.”
New monuments are added to that list every year. Post-war buildings, for example, that are worth preserving. In addition, the existing monuments are getting older. “So the care is only getting more”, says Nijmeijer.
Nijmeijer has lived through twenty of the forty years that the Monumentenwacht has been in Drenthe. “I go to work happy every day,” says Nijmeijer. “The variety of buildings, the variety of people. Every day is different. One day you’re hanging in a tower, the next day you’re standing on the moor near a small farm.”
That passion sometimes strikes. “We sometimes hear from our partners that we look up too often and see too many things on the roof. Isn’t a roof tile crooked somewhere or is something broken? Sometimes we also call an owner who doesn’t have a subscriber at all. Then we have helped again.”