Hoogeveen

Hoogeveen was dug before it was built. Founded in 1625 as a peat colony — a company town for turf, the fuel that fired the Golden Age's cities — it grew along canals cut to float the black gold south, and when the peat was exhausted, the town filled in its waterways and turned them into streets: the broad Hoofdstraat, one of the longest main streets in the country, is a buried canal, and the whole plan of Hoogeveen is the fossil of its industry, legible to anyone who knows what the straightness means. Drenthe's second town then did what colonies must — diversified into trade, transport and manufacturing — while keeping a churchgoing steadiness that once expressed itself in a famous local custom: the Sunday drum, beaten through the streets to call worshippers, a tradition maintained for centuries and revived on ceremonial occasions in place of bells.

Cultural life centres on De Tamboer — "the drummer", the theatre named for that very custom — the region's substantial hall for touring theatre, opera and concerts, while the register the concert record describes (chamber concerts, choirs, school ensembles, festival visits) carries the year. Around the town, Drenthe's hunebed megaliths and heaths supply the deep past the young colony lacks. Dug, drained, drummed: Hoogeveen's history is all verbs.