In 1959, NAM drillers struck natural gas near Slochteren, a quiet village of farms and cattle barns south of the Wadden coast. The find turned out to be one of the largest onshore gas fields on Earth, and certainly the largest in Europe. For sixty years it bankrolled Dutch welfare programs, paid for highways, and underwrote the cradle-to-grave social contract that Dutch citizens still take as a kind of birthright. A sculpture of a methane molecule sits alongside the A7 motorway near Slochteren as a monument - one blue carbon atom surrounded by four hydrogen atoms in a tetrahedral arrangement. It is a strange thing to celebrate, in retrospect.

As the Groningen field emptied, the porous sandstone reservoir began to compact. Stress redistributed along buried faults. The first induced quakes were too faint to feel. By the 2010s they were rattling chimneys and splitting plaster across Hoogezand, Slochteren, Siddeburen, and Zuidbroek. The Dutch have a phrase for the region now: het aardbevingsgebied, the earthquake area. Tens of thousands of homes were inspected for damage. Many had to be reinforced or rebuilt. House prices fell. Trust in the state fell further. In 2023, Parliament finally ordered Groningen gas production halted - a decision that closed a chapter, but did not undo the cracks.

Midden-Groningen itself is young: it only exists as a municipality because the Dutch government merged Hoogezand-Sappemeer, Slochteren, and Menterwolde into a single administrative unit in 2018. The result is more than twenty towns and villages strung along canals and railway lines through Central Groningen. Hoogezand, the largest, has grown into Sappemeer until you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins - roughly 30,000 people between them. Around the edges, Slochteren still has its borg, the moated estate of Fraeylemaborg, and the lakes Schildmeer and Zuidlaardermeer still draw weekend sailors. The land between is flat, green, and ribboned by water, the way nearly all of Groningen is.

Five stations sit along the line from Groningen city to Bad Nieuweschans, four trains an hour in both directions - Kropswolde, Martenshoek, Hoogezand-Sappemeer, Sappemeer Oost, Zuidbroek. From Zuidbroek a branch peels south to Veendam. The trains used to continue across the border to Leer in Ostfriesland, but a bridge gave way and the German leg has been on substitute buses for years now. It is the kind of small, unresolved inconvenience that defines life in a region that the Randstad rarely thinks about: the trains still run, but not quite all the way they used to.

Drive the A7 east from the city of Groningen and the landscape barely registers as inhabited - canals, farms, the occasional church spire, the long horizon that has so taken the Dutch imagination since Ruisdael painted these skies. But the names along the road carry the past underneath. Hoogezand means high sand, the slight ridge that drew the first settlers. The peat colonies further south were dug out, shipped out, burned in city hearths centuries ago. And the gas, the great hidden inheritance, is finally being capped. What remains is the land itself, settling slowly, in tiny shocks the seismographs can still feel.