Bernhard von Galen, the Prince-Bishop of Munster, was a particular kind of seventeenth-century churchman - one who preferred armies to homilies. In 1665 his troops swept into the eastern Netherlands as part of a war with the Dutch Republic, and the small unfortified villages along the border had no defenses worth the name. Losser, then two separate hamlets clustered around a parish church, was burned on 21 September. The records are stark and the recovery was slow. A few buildings made of stone rather than timber survived in fragments. The most stubborn of them was the Martinustoren, the tower of St. Martin's church, which still stands at the center of town. The rest of the church was demolished in 1903, but the tower - around five hundred years old, built sometime near 1500 - was left standing as the oldest piece of architecture Losser has.

Out at the edge of town, in the village of Glane near the German border, sits something nearly no one expects to find in the Netherlands: the Mor Ephrem Monastery, the only Syriac Orthodox monastery in Europe. The building started life in 1911 as the St Olaf monastery, founded by Norwegian Sisters of Saint Joseph of Chambery in a wave of Catholic religious settlement. On 7 July 1984 the property was transferred to the Syriac Orthodox Church, and Mor Ephrem became the diocesan headquarters for the Netherlands. The Syriac liturgy is sung in classical Aramaic - the closest surviving relative of the language Jesus spoke - and at certain hours of the year you can hear it drifting across a Dutch border village from chants that originated in fourth-century Edessa.

A few kilometers west of the village of De Lutte, the land does something it rarely does in Overijssel: it goes up. The Tankenberg crests at 85 meters, which is enough to be the highest point in the entire province. In a country defined by flatness this is genuinely a hill, with views that on a clear day stretch into Germany. Roman-era geographers may have known the spot under a different name. The historian Tacitus wrote about a sanctuary of the goddess Tanfana somewhere in the lands of the Germanic Marsi, destroyed by the army of Germanicus in 14 CE, and antiquarians have long argued whether the Tankenberg is that place. The connection is conjectural, but the name itself - Tanfana, Tankenberg - has tempted scholars for centuries.

The Dinkel, the river that defines Losser's geography, rises in Germany and meanders north into the Netherlands, flooding its meadows in winter and drawing canoeists and birdwatchers in summer. The municipality straddles the river and runs right up to the German border - close enough that residents shop in Gronau on a whim and that the local dialect, Twents, is closer to Westphalian German than to standard Dutch in some grammatical quirks. The A1 motorway from Amsterdam ends a few kilometers away at the German frontier, making Losser the literal eastern terminus of one of the country's main arteries. This is a town that has always lived on the line.

Losser's most internationally known native is probably Pi de Bruijn, born in 1942, the architect behind the renovation of the Dutch House of Representatives chamber in The Hague among many other public buildings. Kim Kotter, born in Losser in 1982, won the Miss Netherlands title and later turned to directing and production work. Just across the municipal line in Overdinkel, Moniek Nijhuis was born in 1988 and competed in the 100m breaststroke at the London 2012 Summer Olympics. For a town that was burned to its foundations in 1665, Losser has done a respectable job of producing people who reach the wider world.