Before the canals, this region was the Bourtanger Moor, a vast wet bog that spread across what is now Groningen, Drenthe, and the neighboring German plains. It was largely uninhabitable. Travelers avoided it. The peat that filled the bog had been accumulating for thousands of years, layer on layer of compressed sphagnum and reed. To the people of the early modern Netherlands, that peat was simply fuel. Burned in stoves, it warmed houses and powered industry. In the sixteenth century, the city of Groningen looked at the moor to its southeast and saw not a wasteland but a resource. The colonization began with the nearest bogs and worked outward, century by century, until the Bourtanger Moor was almost entirely gone.

Peat extraction requires drainage. You cannot dig wet peat at industrial scale; you have to lower the water table first, and you have to move the cut peat somewhere people will buy it. The Veenkoloniën canals did both. Diggers carved a main channel southeast from Groningen, then branched off lateral canals at regular intervals, then dug back canals like the Boerendiep parallel to the first. The water drained into the channels. Peat barges loaded up at quayside and floated their cargo to the city. Along each new canal, settlers built houses on the banks — the only firm ground in a soggy environment — and a linear village was born. The villages stayed linear because the canals stayed linear. The two largest are Veendam, with about 27,500 residents, and Stadskanaal, with about 20,000. Both still wear their canal-side shape clearly.

When the peat was cut out, the colonists were left with poor, sandy valley soils — the foundation that had been hidden under the bog. For a long time these soils stayed unproductive. The early residents lacked the money to buy the expensive city compost needed to make them grow anything, and the Veenkoloniën carried a hard reputation as a poor place to live. From the mid-nineteenth century, artificial fertilizer and the potato changed the calculation. Outside settlers bought the depleted plots, fed them with nitrate and phosphate, and grew potato crops that fed Dutch starch factories. The region's modern agriculture — the great geometric fields of potatoes, beets, and grain you see from the air — sits on what used to be bog, made productive only after the resource that defined the region was already gone.

The same canals that carried peat barges now carry pleasure boats. Cyclists use the towpaths. The roads between Veendam, Stadskanaal, Pekela, and Musselkanaal stitch together a network of linear villages where bridges across the canals still raise for the occasional sailboat. The most evocative way to see the landscape, though, is on the heritage railway that runs between Veendam and Musselkanaal. The line stopped scheduled passenger service in 1953, but since 1995 the Stadskanaal Rail Foundation has operated historical steam and diesel trains over 26 kilometers — the longest heritage railway in the Netherlands. From a wood-bench carriage window, the geometry of the Peat Colonies unfolds at a pace that lets you read it: straight canal, straight street, straight field edge, repeat.