I started today by getting the Waterbus from central Rotterdam to visit the windmills at Kinderdijk. The boat was full and standing when it left the city for the 30 minute journey up river.
As usual the further you go from the entrance/car park the quieter it gets and I spent most of the day walking along the paths and cycle tracks that run along the dykes between the drainage channels. Most of the windmills today are lived in as private houses but two are open to the public.
Around a quarter of the Netherlands is below sea level and the windmills were originally built to pump water up out of the low lying land so it could be emptied into rivers. Because there was no machinery inside the mill for grinding corn for instance, there was quite a lot of space available for the miller and his family to live inside. All the mechanism needed to do was to operate a waterwheel, often on the outside, to move the water up from one level of drainage channel to the next. However, this often had to be done all the time there was wind so the job was much harder as it could be operating 24 hours a day.
Nowadays there are electric pumping stations using big Archimedes Screws to move the water up hill. At the moment though, because of Europe's dry spell, water is actually having to be moved from the river onto the low lying land. This is because if the peaty soil dries out too much it sinks even further.
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