Full of expectation, a delegation of the hunebed center in Borger will look forward to a truck this afternoon. There is a dozen Drentse Veldkien in the body, which has been located in a sea dyke in Hoorn for centuries.
“We are all very enthusiastic,” says Karla De Roest, archaeologist at the hunebed center. “It’s a very nice day.”
The cargo consists of twelve large boulders, mainly of the granite granite stone. Stone connoisseur Harry Huisman went to Hoorn to find them out. Huisman: “They are really Drents. I can recognize that at a glance.”
In Noord-Holland the boulders were used in dikes to protect the inhabitants against the seawater. The original wooden dikes were eaten by pole worm and turned into a kind of hole cheese. In the eighteenth century, ship loads of Drenthe boulders were sold and brought to Hoorn.
“West Friesland has no stones, so the first place where they got stones was Drenthe,” says Michiel Bartels, municipal archaeologist in the Hoorn region. “
Now seawall is often made from basalt blocks. In the meantime, the boulders in Hoorn have become largely superfluous. Thousands are still scattered throughout the city beach in the North Holland city. And that was a thorn in the eye of a few councilors.
“We actually wanted something nice to happen to it again,” says Chris de Meij, councilor at Hart van Hoorn. “Then we had the idea to realize a dolmen in Hoorn, but that might go a bit too far.” Then came the idea to return the stones to our province.
And the hunebed center had ears. There is a place for them reserved in the museum’s Oertijdpark. Circles are indicated in the grass where the boulders may be. “We would like to make it look a bit playful so that it reminds a bit of the dike where they come from,” says De Roest.
The stones are on the picnic field. “And where we would rather not have people climb on hunebeds, they can sit on these stones.”