Every design for Heerenveen

Three gentlemen founded a company in the sixteenth century to buy up land and dig peat, and the village that grew where their two canals crossed took its name from them: the lords of the peat, Heerenveen. It is the oldest peat-canal village in the Netherlands, known in Frisian as It Hearrenfean.

Crackstate, one of the old Frisian manor houses, recalls the well-to-do citizens who made the town grow in the nineteenth century, and with Oenemastate and the wooded park landscape of Oranjewoud to the east it earned Heerenveen the nickname the Frisian Hague. For a long time a municipal border ran right through the village, between Aengwirden and Schoterland, until the two were finally joined. Everyday life now runs along shopping streets such as the Dracht and the Lindegracht, past Museum Heerenveen, and out into neighbourhoods that have grown together with Oudeschoot, Nijehaske and the other nearby villages.

What was once a single ribbon along the water, kilometres long and barely wider than the gap between the railway and the main road, has rounded into an oval, and on the map you can still trace the old line of the canal through the middle of it.