During the Russian-English invasion of 1799, the so-called forgotten war, the province will again have to deal with war on its own soil. Tens of thousands of soldiers land in Den Helder. Following fierce fighting follows, with the bloody high point of the Battle of Castricum.
Amateur archaeologist Jim Botman searches the silent witnesses with his metal detector. In some places the soil is still full of traces of this forgotten battle.
Looking back instead of forgotten
And then there are the scars from the twentieth century: remains of the Atlantic Wall, the German line of defense from the Second World War, which are scattered everywhere along the coast of Noord-Holland.
Nowadays we look at these remains differently, says Anouk Veldman. Where we first saw bunkers as a nasty memory of the war that we would rather forget, they are now, slowly included in the landscape, a tangible part of the history of our province.