All the way from Holland (and Flanders)

For several years now, I have been recording Dutch rubbish (and some from Flanders, Dutch-speaking Belgium) washed up on Suffolk's beaches. As a British and Dutch dual national and Dutch speaker living in Suffolk. I am particularly interested in the writing on this flotsam and jetsom from over the North Sea, which often gives clues to where exactly this washed up rubbish has come from.

"Car, boat, household, technical" Kara brand spray paint, Dingle Beach January 2015

Complementary cigarette lighter from Adinkerke, a seaside village on the Flemish (Belgian) border with France. Adinkerk is where Brits go to buy Belgian tobacco. Tobacco duty in Belgium is lower, and the village is full of giant tobacconists. I've checked, the lighter floats! I once found two of these on Dingle Beach on the same day.

Crate for Holland Fish Auction, Ijmuiden. Ijmuiden is one of the closest Dutch harbours to the East of England, it's where most of the yachts that sail to Suffolk depart from. Found on Covehithe Beach, December 2014

"Koffiemelk" (coffee creamer), gold band "extra creamy". This is the popular Friesche Vlag (Fries Flag) brand, for Friesland in the North of the Netherlands. Found on Covehithe Beach, December 2014. Most Dutch people drink this stuff, rather than milk, in their coffee.

Jumbo brand "halfvolle melk" (semi-skimmed milk) from Veghel, on the coast of North Holland Province, roughly opposite Suffolk. Jumbo is a local discount North Holland supermarket chain.

Bleached "lippenbalsam" (lip balm) stick, Dutch brand, Dunwich Beach, summer 2014

"Nutritional content" information on a Belgian fizzy orange drink bottle, in both Dutch and French. Between Walberswick and Dingle Beach, May 2014.

Dutch-language safety cap, stamped with OPEN/DICHT (open/close) and "Tijdens duwen indrukken" (press in while turning). Between Dunwich and Sizewell, summer 2013.

Most of the items I've found that have come all the way from Holland are milk cartons - those with still legible sell-by dates on them are at least six months old, so they've taken a while to make the voyage of around 90-120 nautical miles over the North Sea to Suffolk's beaches. A lot of these cartons of "halfvolle melk" (semi-skimmed milk) are from local dairies in Noord Holland (North Holland) - the province of the Netherlands that you'd come to if you sailed in a straight line from the Suffolk coast. Some cartons - like the Melken brand semi-skimmed vanilla yoghurt carton below - are from dairies in Zuid Holland, a little bit further down the coast.


Melkan vanilla yoghurt from Beesd in the province of South Holland proudly declares that it's made from milk from cows that have been eating grass in a field for at least six hours a day for the past 120 days.

Milk cartons aren't the sort of thing you'd take to the beach with you and you'd be unlikely to take milk cartons with you on a sailing boat unless you were on a long voyage all the way to England. Dutch people on short sailing trips would be more likely to take "koffiemelk" (coffee creamer, see above) that they drink with coffee (they don't drink milk in their tea). Coffee milk keeps better.

A sailing trip to bring over a boat to Suffolk would take around 22 hours on a summer night, according to the two sailors I met at Walberswick Harbour last summer, who took that long to sail their brother-in-law's boat from Ijmuiden.




Directions to the Netherlands' major cities are given on the Euroscope, the monument marking the mainland UK's easternmost point at Ness Point, Lowestoft. There's also a sign pointing out to sea and to the nearest Dutch and Belgian ports outside the Seaman's Reading Room at Southwold (below).

Some items originating in the Netherlands that end up washed up on Suffolk beaches could have been lost overboard on sailing boats. There's a fair amount of tubes of lubricant for boats and their engines, and I've found one safety top of some kind of container with a Dutch-language version of the "press inwards while twisting off" screw-top. Also notable are the crates stamped with "property of Holland Fish Auction, Ijmuiden" and "Property of Fish Store Holland Northern" (Eigendom Vis Afslag Hollands Noorden). I looked up this particular fish cold storage facility online and it's in the relatively small fishing port of Den Oever, which is right down the coast from Den Helder, a big Navy port. Were a crate to fall off the side of the docks at Den Helder or Den Oever and be swept out to see, coastal Suffolk is where it would end up.

This crate from the Den Oever fish cold storage facility, used by the local fishing fleet to store their catch when it's landed, was at the "Plastic Palace" between Dunwich Heath and Sizewell Beach in the summer of 2013.

The Dutch-language lettering on this tube of lubricant reads, "Universal Water-resistant Spreadable Grease." It presumably fell off, or was discarded from, a boat. Found between Dunwich and Sizewell, 2013.

And there's also packaging from Belgium washed up on Suffolk's coast - from Flanders (Vlanderen) the autonomous Dutch-speaking region of Belgium that occupies the coast. Most Belgian packaging (and some Dutch packaging, destined for the "Benelux" market) is in Dutch and French. Notable among the Belgian rubbish ending up on our shores are the cigarette lighters from Adinkerke, where Brits go after they've filled the van at Calais with alcohol. Adinkerke's right on the French-Belgian border and cheap tobacco, with a lower level of duty, is what they're after. Whether Adinkerke lighters have washed up on Suffolk Coastal all the way from the Flemish coast, of whether they were dropped over the side of a Channel ferry on its way into a ferry port on the South coast is unclear. (I'm in contact with an oceanographer who can talk me through the sea currents between the Low Countries and Suffolk.)

Sty brand mineral water from Belgium, with bilingual Dutch and French label. Found between Walberswick and Dingle Beach, 2014

How this milk carton from the landlocked Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, inland from Belgium, came to be washed up on Southwold Beach in June 2014 is a bit of a mystery! Luxembourg does have a river fleet that cruises the major Belgian waterways carrying freight all the way to the sea at the Belgian port of Antwerp, so it may have reached Southwold through that route.

And here's an oil cap all the way from Germany, found between Dunwich and Sizewell in 2013. It would have had to drift quite a long way south to arrive in Suffolk

Et viola! Creme fraiche apparently all the way from France, in an exclusively French-language carton. This one was found in Covehithe in early 2014. The majority of foreign finds on Suffolk's beaches, though are Dutch. Beachcombing one day in early 2015 between Dingle and Walberswick, about half the items I found whose origin was identifiable were from the Netherlands.

This list of ingredients on a carobonated fizzy orange bottle found in Dingle (above) in early 2014 is in French and Dutch, but four-figure postcode starting with a 9 identifies it as coming from Brakel in Gelderland (southeast Netherlands). Amsterdam postcodes would start with "10", for example.

Typically Dutch: Fresian cows grazing the fens and a windmill feature on this carton of Smeek cheese spread. The Dutch do love their dairy products! This one was on display at the "Plastic Palace" just south of Dunwich Heath in 2013.

There's plenty more where that came from! And plenty more photos. I haven't come across any Dutch rubbish on Suffolk beaches for many months, though. Most of my finds have been in remote stretches of the coast between beaches where people go, or in largely deserted beaches like Covehithe, and off-season, when there are long intervals between beach-cleans. I suspect that many of my finds were left over from various tidal surges that flooded the Suffolk coast, or "overtopping," and I have a theory that Dutch residents along the coast had dutifully put their cartons in the correct recycling bins one winter's night, only for these to be swept out to sea by a sudden tidal surge.

I've also heard the theory that there were "too many bottletops" on East Anglia's coast, that some of the plastic bottlecaps found there in great abundance couldn't have got there by people leaving them on East Anglian beaches alone, some must have come from the North Sea. The same source speculated on whether there's a great graveyard of East Anglian plastic bottlecaps somewhere on the coast of Holland or Germany.

Stichting De Noordzee (The North Sea Foundation), the national charity that help organise beach-cleans up the Dutch coast and on the beaches of "the islands" to the North, has a report from the 2014 and 2013 "National Beach-clean Tours" on its website.

Last year, the most frequently found bits of rubbish were fishing line and netting, balloons with string attached, and little bits of plastic. Based on the 2013 Beach-Clean Tour, they estimated there were around 514,000 bits of fishing line lying around on the Dutch coast.

There was also "a great increase in the quantity of tops of plastic bottles observed." Thousands of plastic tops were gathered during the National Beach-clean Tour, and these were made into a 2.5-metre sculpture named "Capman."

On tourist beaches, there was a lot of packaging for drinks and sweets, cigarette ends and plastic bags. On "non-tourist" beaches, "maritime" items were found: wooden pallets, jerrycans, cleaning fluid and paraffin (containers?) accounted for the biggest share of the rubbish.

I've parked this draft article here as I'm making some pitches - one for a project in Suffolk - possibly a small travelling exhibition or series of talks or activities in schools, or both. I also hope to approach East Anglian print media, as well as print media in the Netherlands, where "the environment" is always a very hot topic.

Watch this space!

Words and images: Copyright Matt Salusbury

Fortean Traveller, the Heksenwaag, Ouderwater, Holland

This article first appeared in Fortean Times issue 255, November 2009

Matt Salusbury is weighed in the balance and found not witching









Oudewater


THE HISTORIC market town of Oudewater lies in the official ‘Green Heart’ of the crowded Netherlands, a green buffer zone that prevents the cities of Amsterdam, Utrecht and Rotterdam reaching out to form one huge Tokyo-style conurbation. Oudewater is a 50-minute bus ride from local provincial capital Utrecht, past the occasional windmill and car showroom and along neat and tidy maize fields and well-kept pastures grazed by enormous cows. Dutch agriculture is a very orderly affair indeed.

You can walk through charming little Oudewater, with the narrow river Ijssel running through the middle of it, in a few minutes. It has waterfront brick houses dating from Holland’s 17th century ‘Golden Age,’ with gables and staring ornamental heads above the door. Subsidence over the years has made some of the houses lean forward at eccentric angles. Like many Medieval Dutch market towns, Oudewater still has its old waag, its weighing house, where weights and measures were officially set. In an agricultural economy based on commodities sold by weight, the weighing house would have been one of the town’s most important institutions. Oudewater’s weighing house is an unassuming little two-storey stone building on the waterfront, on the corner of Leeuwingen Street. But Oudewater’s weighing house is world famous as the Heksenwaag, the ‘Witch Weigher,’ the place where desperate people accused of witchcraft came to from as far away as Germany and even Hungary to be officially weighed to determine whether or not they were witches.

The Heksenwaag still weighs people to check whether they are witches, on an industrial scale. When I visited, the salaried Weighing Master (in fact a weighing mistress) was taking a well-earned day off, and volunteer Maaike den Boer was interrogating and weighing day-tripping families at the rate of about one every three minutes. Her volunteer colleague, Jaap van der Laan – also the Heksenwaag’s Spanish interpreter – somehow found time between weigh-ins and signing visitors’ certificates to tell me the Witch Weigher has around 70 punters a day stepping onto its scales in the summer high season, and Jaap estimated that their all-time record is close to 2000 in a week, including all the school trips, parties and weddings.

They still use the 500-year old wooden scales, all original except for the ropes. August sunlight poured in through the high windows at the top of the weighing chamber, which is a large room with a high ceiling, with an old iron balance from which thick ropes suspend two plain, square wooden platforms big enough to comfortably accommodate one person. The platforms hang just above the floor – I somehow managed to get my size 11 boot wedged fast between the floor and the scale.











The Heksenwaag's witch-weighing scales, all original apart from the ropes


The witch weighing procedure is as follows: you stand on one of the scales, while the volunteer interrogates you about your personal habits – cooking with herbs, a love of walking in the woods, and a preference for mushrooms are all suspicious signs. Then there’s the question about whether you’ve ever eaten an egg that’s been brooded on by a snake. Tip: answer ‘no’ to this one, a ‘yes; answer is apparently a dead giveaway. The interrogation complete, the inquisitor then loads some big old cast iron weights on the other scale. You need to weigh a minimum of 100 pounds to clear the witch-test (the weights have actually gone metric), but there are complicated adjustments for your height, build and age. They’re vague about this formula, but when I was there, everyone was declared of ‘normal body weight for a human’– even the girl who I though had rather blown her chances by putting on the tall fancy dress witch’s hat and clutching the broomstick she’d found lying on a nearby bench.











Volunteer Maaike interrogates witchcraft suspects


On payment of an extra €I, I walked away with a certificate in Dutch with 16th century spelling. While the certificate didn’t explicitly state that I wasn’t a witch, it did confirm that I had a normal weight for a human of my ‘bodily proportions’, and it bore the stamp of the Town Council of Oudewater. (English versions are available too.) The current Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands was weighed back in April 1952, and monarchists will be glad to hear that a constitutional crisis was no doubt averted by the confirmation that she was not a witch either.

We can all laugh today at this Monty Python and the Holy Grail-type tourist attraction – the film features a distinctly dodgy-looking witch weighing in which the accused was declared a witch after she was found to s weigh exactly the same as a duck – but witch weighing once a deadly serious business. Witches were thought to be supernaturally lightweight, which is why they had the power of flight. Desperate witchcraft suspects – often accused because of family feuds, land disputes or anonymous letters in the local mayor’s letterbox, came from far and wide to get a certificaat from Oudewater’s Heksenwaag. Its reputation was enough to prove beyond doubt they were too heavy to be a witch, thereby saving them from the stake. Holland’s last mass witch trial was in the southern town of Roermond in 1613, in which at least 40 condemned were burnt at the stake, in a witch panic that may have been a manifestation of the contemporary Catholic counter-reformation. An unusually high proportion of convicted Dutch witches in the 16th century were children – often alleged to have caused the milk of nursing mothers or cows to dry up.

The Seven Provinces of the Netherlands (the union of the majority Protestant provinces to the north) banned the death penalty for witchcraft in 1614, but other sanctions such as exile remained, and witch trials continued in the Catholic south. Dutch Protestant spiritual leaders continued to rail against witches long after the Reformation, and curiously, ultra-Protestant Holland continued to force feed Holy Water mixed with the wax of Easter candles to suspect witches, which was supposed to make them to reveal their true form. Two Dutch sceptics were significant in undermining belief in witchcraft, Dr Johann Weyer dismissed most witchcraft accusations as female hysteria, but believed there were some male witches. His work influenced the Scottish King James VI (later James I of England) and his witchcraft-sceptic book Daemonologie (1597). The Dutch Protestant minister Balthasar Bekker’s bestselling four-volume De Betoverde Weereld (The Betwitched World, 1693) concluded that the world had no demons or witches, and that these were the products of ‘heathen’ pre-Christian superstition. He didn’t completely rule out the existence of the Devil, but the Church authorities concluded that doubting the existence of the Devil would lead inevitably to questioning whether there was a God either, and he was declared a heretic and fled into exile in Sweden.

Did the town fathers of Oudewater believe in witches? Jaap told me that original certificates issued by Oudewater witch weighers are in the Province of Utrecht archives, and they’re accompanied by long and chilling dispositions of the trials and the circumstances of the witch weigh-ins. Some of the defendants who were recorded as non-witches in Oudewater were strikingly lightweight and thin, according to these records. It may be that Oudewater’s Weighing Masters, having earned a reputation for integrity in weights and measures, quietly used their power to save the lives of hundreds of people charged with a crime whose very existence they doubted.

Any why Oudewater? The apocryphal story goes that the 14th century Hapsburg Emperor Charles V, when the region was part of the Spanish Netherlands, was travelling in the area and sat in on a witch trail in the nearby town of Polsbroek. The local court recorded a supernaturally low weight for the accused woman, which the Emperor found hard to believe. Oudewater had a reputation locally for ‘correct’ weights and measures, so the accused was taken to Oudewater to be weighed, where the Weighing Master ruled that she weighed comfortably over 100 pounds, and she was freed. (Could Charles V have been quietly witchcraft sceptic too?) Oudewater’s Weighing Master also refused the ‘gold ducats’ the emperor offered for his services. Impressed by his integrity, the Emperor granted Oudewater’s Weighing Master an exclusive permit to weigh suspected witches. But all the surviving Heksenwaag certificates date from much later, the earliest extant ones are from the early 17th century, while what appears to be the last serious certificate declaring the bearer to have a non-paranormal human body weight dates from 1733, many years after the European witch panics are supposed to have subsided. Current Weighing Master Dr Jeanette Blake said she couldn’t be certain about the date of the last genuine Oudewater certificate, because ‘they were hectic times.’

There’s an extensive bilingual Dutch and English display on the history of Dutch witchcraft in the Heksenwaag’s attic, along with audiovisual presentations, an early edition of De Betoverde Wereld, and some reconstructed ‘witch rings’ – clumps of feathers that were supposed to have magically formed into rings, found inside the pillows of witches. Witch rings provided enough evidence to get you burnt at the stake following a 15th century witch trial, typically of ten minutes’ duration.


The Heksenwaag is open every day from March to the end of September, 10am-5.30, admission is €4.50, excluding certificate of weighing. The Connexxion bus service 180 to Oudewater runs hourly from outside Utrecht Central Station, and more frequently from Gouda Central Station. Dutch Railways have discount advance deals on the Eurostar from London to any station in Holland.

© Matt Salusbury 2009