Beetsterzwaag and Olterterp park landscape

The Beetsterzwaag and Olterterp park landscape lies like an island of woods, lanes and compact open spaces in the sweeping Friesian countryside. After the clearing of the peatland, the area was favoured by wealthier farmers and Friesian nobility, who began to lay out country estates and woodlands in the middle of the eighteenth century. What makes the park landscape of Beetsterzwaag and Olterterp so unusual is above all the combination of farming and garden history. The structural lines formed by the agrarian activities form the frame, as it were, within which the pearls of the country homes can shine. In the course of the twentieth century this park landscape slowly entered a period of decay. It is still beautiful, but the area has grown fragmented and lost its coherence as nature slowly takes over.

After an in-depth study of the history of the area, we drew up a spatial vision for the future for the whole ensemble and for the separate estates and country homes. We designed a frame for the man-made landscape: long lines of ditches, roads and green borders. Further we designed a new configuration of the woodland and open spaces that is more exciting than the present situation. We also noted the essential features of each estate and made proposals to develop them.

Money to actually refurbish and manage the estates and country homes is a major problem, so we and the steward Age Fennema went in search of new sources of economic support: direct forms of payment, such as paid parking, S(up)port for Nature, small-scale guest accommodation, events, excursions and donors, as well as indirect forms of payment such as green and blue services, an estate or landscape fund, landscape auctions, crowd funding, and biomass retail through the local biomass plant. We also made proposals to improve the balance between the advantages and drawbacks of the park landscape.