Heath - low scrubby vegetation on poor, sandy soil - covered great swaths of the northern Netherlands for centuries. Communities managed it deliberately. Some patches were kept open for grazing sheep. Others, like De Pol, were maintained as sightlines. With the trees cut back, no armed party could sneak up under cover. The strategy belonged to a world where small raids and cattle theft were ordinary risks, where a community's wealth was its livestock and its lookouts mattered. In 1814 the field passed through several hands in a single year, from deputy Ludolph Theodorus van Hasselt's heirs to a merchant to a pharmacist named Herman Christiaan Reinders. In 1816 Johan Coenraad van Hasselt built a house on it and planted a stand of pine forest. The defensive gap had outlived its purpose.

In 1871 the Van Hasselt heirs sold the estate - by then 24 bundles, 42 square rod, and 26 square cubits, in the marvelously specific Dutch units of the day - to Count Jean Baptiste Remy François Dumonceau de Bergendal. Dumonceau, son of a Napoleonic-era general, ran a flax factory in Groningen on the Schuitendiep. He demolished the old house and built a new farm in the 1880s. In 1888 the city of Groningen approached his widow with an unsettling proposition: they wanted to buy part of De Pol to build a 'cottage asylum' for 250 mentally ill patients drawn from across Groningen and Drenthe provinces. The architect Egbertus Gerhardus Wentink drew up plans - a main building, six pavilions, hospital barracks, two work sheds, a morgue. Negotiations dragged on for three years and finally broke down. The asylum was built at Loosduinen instead. De Pol remained a country estate.

Between 1913 and 1914, banker Johan Herman Geertsema Willemszoon commissioned a new villa from the architect Gerrit Nijhuis. It was a plastered house with Swiss chalet flourishes, sited for the long view westward over the Drentsche Aa and the Westerlanden stream valley. He moved in from his previous home, Villa Blankeweer, in 1915. He lasted two years. In 1917 he sold the place to Willem Onnes, a Groningen coffee trader who would later add Rost to his name. Rost Onnes lived there for thirty-five years. When his wife Meta died, he sold the forty-hectare estate in 1952 to the Noord-Nederlandse Golf & Country Club, which had been founded two years earlier and was tired of playing on a field near Eelde Airport. The villa became the clubhouse. The course, nine holes designed by the Scottish architect Sir Guy Campbell, opened in 1954 - built largely by hand, by sixty unemployed workers paid through the Works Implementation Service.

On 23 May 1977, South Moluccan activists hijacked a passenger train near De Punt, a few kilometres south. They held 50 passengers hostage for twenty days. The Dutch government coordinated its response from several locations, and one of them was the clubhouse at De Poll. Forty soldiers and marines from the Bijzondere Bijstands Eenheid - the Dutch counter-terrorism unit - camped at the golf course while planners worked out the assault. On 11 June, six F-104 Starfighters flew low over the train to disorient the hijackers while marines stormed the carriages. Six of the nine hijackers and two hostages died. It remains one of the most controversial uses of military force in postwar Dutch history. The marines packed up and left. The greenkeepers went back to mowing fairways. The course expanded to 18 holes in 1987, redesigned by Frank Pennink, and was tuned further by Donald Steel through the 1990s. The villa where the banker once watched sunsets over the Drentsche Aa still serves as the clubhouse, and the rhododendrons in the park landscape come into bloom every spring.