Assen exists because of a battle, and a punishment for losing it. In 1227 the peasants of Drenthe slaughtered the army of the Bishop of Utrecht at Ane - the bishop was among the dead - and the next bishop ordered a nunnery built near Coevorden as penance. The site was a sodden peat flat that flooded; by 1258 the Cistercians had given up and moved Marienkamp Abbey to drier ground in an area called Witten, alongside the old farming hamlets of Deurze and Peelo. Around the relocated abbey, a settlement slowly grew. After the abbey's property was secularised around 1600, the provincial government of Drenthe moved into the buildings, and a town that had never been a town became, in practice, a capital. Assen's coat of arms is still the seal of the abbey - Mary with the child Jesus, who has politely switched from one knee to the other.

City rights came late, in 1809, granted by King Louis Napoleon. The TT came later still, and changed everything. The TT Circuit Assen has been on the world motorcycle championship calendar every year since the championship began in 1949 - with the sole exception of 2020, when the race was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic - which is why riders call it the Cathedral of Motorcycle Racing. On the last Sunday in June the Dutch TT fills the grandstands, and a quiet town of civil servants and dairy and a Dutch oil company headquarters becomes, briefly, one of the loudest places in Europe. The rest of the year Assen is quieter than its reputation. Forty-one percent of journeys here are made by bicycle. The city centre is closed to through motor traffic. Drenthe calls itself the cycling province of the Netherlands, and the prologue and opening stage of the 2009 Vuelta a Espana ran through these streets.

The museum stands on the site of the old abbey, in the 1882 building that once housed the provincial government. Inside, alongside the Yde Girl, are some of the oldest signs of human life in the Netherlands - finds from the Funnel Beaker culture, the Neolithic farmers who, around 3400-2900 BCE, raised the great stone burial chambers called hunebeds, the Dutch dolmens, that still stand in fields across Drenthe. The peat that preserved the Yde Girl preserved many things. Bodies, tools, wooden trackways across the bogs. The province is a layered archive of itself, and Assen is the door.

After the Second World War, Assen had fewer than 20,000 people. The TT had made the name known abroad; the Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij - the Dutch national oil company - made the city economically serious by setting up its headquarters here. Industry followed, then services, then suburbs. Today Assen is one of the fastest-growing cities in the northern Netherlands, with a population well past sixty thousand and an unusually large student presence at the Drenthe College vocational school and the Hanze Institute of Technology. In 2025 the city was named winner of the European Green Leaf Award for 2027 - a recognition more readily understood here, perhaps, than the trophy lifted at the TT every June. The Cathedral of Speed and the cycling capital and the museum of the bog body are all the same small city. It just took most of a century for the world to notice.