Before the rides, before the kitchens, before the tourists, there were peat cutters. The wider area was first recorded in 1233 under the name Venloon, and in 1269 Jan I of Brabant loaned 'the village of Venloon with its moors, nuts and wild lands' to Willem van Horne, creating its first fiefdom. In the 14th century the soft peat soil turned out to be ideal fuel, and small communities formed around the work - one of them on a hill that would eventually be called Kaatsheuvel. The villagers dug peat out of the ground, dried it, processed it, and hauled it away. When the peat ran out in the 1400s, they pivoted to subsistence farming and hunting in the surrounding woods. The land itself shaped what people did for centuries, until industry arrived.

After the Peace of Munster in 1648, Brabant was carved up. The southern half stayed Spanish; the northern half - Staats-Brabant - became part of the Dutch Republic but was treated as a colonial possession rather than a real province. Money flowed out. Catholic worship was outlawed, so the people of Kaatsheuvel slipped across to the White Castle in Loon op Zand for services in a hidden chapel. The mix of poverty, forest, and a porous border with Holland attracted opportunists. Around 1720 a gang called de Witte Veer (the White Feather) operated out of the Ravenbosch woods, exploiting the legal gap: they would raid in Holland and shelter in Brabant. The deputy governor finally caught their leader, known as Black John, in 1725.

By the 19th century, the wider Langstraat region around Kaatsheuvel and Waalwijk had built a sprawling leather and shoe industry. Many families lived from tanning, cutting, or trading footwear - a trade so identified with the area that the Shoe and Leather Museum in nearby Waalwijk still tells its story. Then the pastor and the curate opened their recreation field. In 1952, after the war, Efteling reopened with a Sprookjesbos - a fairytale forest - largely designed by the celebrated Dutch illustrator Anton Pieck working with technical designer Peter Reijnders. Pieck's intricate, slightly melancholy storybook aesthetic became the park's signature. Efteling was named best amusement park in Europe in 1971 - becoming the first theme park to receive the Pomme d'Or (Golden Apple), the highest award in the European tourist industry - and best theme park in the world in 1992. Its dark rides Villa Volta, water show Aquanura, and Symbolica have all won international THEA Awards. A pastor's hiking field became the largest theme park empire in the country.

Three theories compete for the etymology of Kaatsheuvel. Heuvel means hill - that part is settled. The Kaats is harder. One tradition links it to Saint Catharina, a popular medieval saint. Another claims villagers were known for playing a game called kaatsspel on a nearby rise. The most plausible explanation is also the most ordinary: a 17th-century man named Hendrik Cets lived on a hill where the town now stands, and over generations Cetsheuvel softened into Kaatsheuvel. A town named after a single resident, by his neighbours, with no plaque to mark it.

Brabantian food culture comes from making do. Worstenbroodjes - sausage rolls wrapped in bread dough rather than expensive puff pastry - originated because farmers had access to plenty of meat from the leather industry but little money for fancier ingredients. Kaatsheuvel has its own version, the Mikkemannen: little bread-dough figures spiced with gingerbread and cinnamon, eaten with butter and sugar, invented because speculaas biscuits were too pricey for southern families. The same instinct for shrewd local business produced Ben Mandemakers, who started selling kitchens in Kaatsheuvel in 1978 and built the Mandemakers Groep into the largest kitchen empire in the Netherlands. Several of its showrooms still operate in town. Pastor, illustrator, kitchen baron - the town has had a knack for outsized export from an unassuming address.