Cultural landscape in the slope of South Limburg, Netherlands.

by Marjolein Zijlstra

In the hills of southern Limburg, it is the undulations of the landscape that often historically already determine the layout of the area. Field roads, dirt paths and hollow roads have historically been created using the natural vegetation created by the landscape under the influence of the natural conditions on site. As a result, arable lands are historically rarely straight. Land consolidation in the last decade has already changed this in many places and parcels of land have been straightened in consultation with authorities and owners for economic reasons. Trees, hedges and shrubs are still part of the agricultural landscape. Whereas in the past the hedge was seriously under pressure and was replaced by barbed wire, there has now been a turnaround and subsidy-driven in the interest of biodiversity, mixed hedges are being reintroduced as property partitions. This improves the visual quality of the landscape, increases biodiversity in both flora and fauna, and fulfils the intention to form a bocage landscape.
The bocage landscape is a semi-open landscape with meadows, hayfields and fields interspersed with many small landscape elements such as wood edges, graves, thickets and pools. Because of the undulations in the landscape and to combat erosion, it is customary to cultivate crops at right angles to the course of the land, reducing the amount of soil that is washed away during heavy rainfall. An aspect that, with the increase in weather extremes, is of great importance in the South Limburg Hill Country in the context of flood nuisance in the lower-lying parts of the landscape, villages and towns.