There are no paths running through it and you can’t sail, only if you go out with a forester of Natuurmonumenten, Het Hol in Kortenhoef shows its hidden beauty. It is one of the most beautiful pristine nature reserves in Noord-Holland. Of course NH saw a kingfisher, saw basin and the special Galigaan.
With forester Renske Diek we sail softly over the lake. She points out: “There is a kingfisher there. In the Elzenboom on that island.” We turn off the engine and float further ahead in silence. The kingfisher is about a meter and a half above the water and shows itself nicely and then shoots away. “That is the magical of the cave, you always have this kind of special encounters here.”
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The cave is special because the peat is close to the sand of the Utrechtse Heuvelrug in a thin layer. “The cave is therefore very low in food. As a result, many special plants can grow here. Rarely orchids, for example, which we also call in the Netherlands. And Galigan, that is a kind of grass that grows in large pollen on the waterfront.”
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A lot disappears as unspoiled as it can be, without human intervention: “We mow some fields here so that not everything becomes forest. In some places we do that for reeds, in other places we sometimes even scrape the top layer away so that the rarest orchids can grow there, such as the Veenmosorchis.”