The Oude Kerk - the Old Church - has had a building on its footprint since the tenth century, and parts of that original structure are still embedded in the present walls. It is one of the oldest churches in the Netherlands. In the fourteenth century the church was expanded and a cloister built nearby. For most of its life Oosterbeek was a small forest village around this church. The transformation began in the 1800s, when landscape painters discovered the place: Hendrik Willem Mesdag, best known today for the gigantic Panorama Mesdag in The Hague, lived and worked here. The painters drew the wealthy. The wealthy built villas, often enormous ones, scattered through the wooded estates. More than a percent of present-day Oosterbeek's houses are appraised at over a million euros - the legacy of that nineteenth-century enthusiasm.

Operation Market Garden was supposed to leap the lower Rhine in a single airborne stroke. The British 1st Airborne Division landed west of Arnhem on 17 September with orders to seize the great road bridge and hold it until XXX Corps fought its way north. Only a small force under Lieutenant Colonel John Frost reached the bridge. The rest of the division could not break through to him, and Frost's men were eventually overwhelmed. The remainder of the division, pulled back into the woods and villas of Oosterbeek, formed a desperate perimeter around Hotel Hartenstein, where divisional headquarters had set up. The Oude Kerk became a forward medical post. For nine days the perimeter held against German tanks, infantry, and mortars. Lower Oosterbeek was destroyed in the process. On the night of 25-26 September, in Operation Berlin, between 2,400 and 2,500 men were ferried across the Rhine to safety. About 7,900 were left behind. Nearly 1,500 of those were dead. The rest were captured.

Opposite the railway line lies one of the largest World War II military cemeteries in the Netherlands, the Airborne Cemetery. The rows of identical white headstones contain mostly British and Polish paratroopers - men in their twenties who jumped from gliders and transports on a warm September Sunday and never went home. Every year on the Sunday closest to 17 September, children from local schools lay flowers on each grave. It is a tradition that has been kept up unbroken since the late 1940s, by Dutch families who remember what these soldiers came to do. The Airborne Museum at Hartenstein, opened in 1978 in the rebuilt hotel that once was Major-General Urquhart's headquarters, tells the rest of the story - the radios that did not work, the gliders that came down in the wrong fields, the civilians who hid the wounded.

Oosterbeek today is back to being a wealthy, forested suburb of Arnhem, with quiet streets winding between villas and old estates. Many of those estates are publicly accessible, criss-crossed by hiking and cycling paths. The terrain is, by Dutch standards, genuinely hilly - the southern edge of the Veluwe rises here. The two main shopping streets, Utrechtseweg and Weverstraat, run through what was once the centre of the perimeter. Most of the buildings are postwar. A few survived. Trolley buses on the 352 line glide silently past the cemetery and the museum and the old church, carrying commuters between Arnhem and Wageningen on a route that was once a contested supply road.

Oosterbeek is unusual because it carries two of the most photographed kinds of Dutch landscape at once: the gentle Barbizon woods that the nineteenth-century painters loved, and the battlefield memorial landscape of a war that ended eighty years ago. You can stand at the edge of the Airborne Cemetery, look across the rails at the woods, and see the same trees that show up in the Mesdag-era paintings. The trees are older now. The paintings are in museums. The men in the ground beneath them were British and Polish and very young, and they came here because the road bridge at Arnhem was, for a few days in September, the most important bridge in Europe.