Between 350,000 and 130,000 years ago, during the Saalian glaciation, an ice sheet pushed down from Scandinavia and stopped roughly along the line of the modern Rhine. The leading edge of that ice bulldozed soil and rock into long ridges - stuwwallen, the Dutch call them - and when the ice melted, the ridges stayed. The highest of them tops out at 110 meters. That is not much by Alpine standards, but in a country where most cities sit below sea level it counts as a mountain range. Scattered through the sandy soil are Scandinavian erratics, granite boulders the glacier carried hundreds of kilometers and dropped here when it died.

Forest covered the Veluwe once the climate warmed, but it did not last. From the medieval period onward, iron-makers cleared the woods for charcoal, and within a few centuries most of the ancient tree cover was gone. What remained was sand - poor, dry, exposed - and wind did the rest, raising dunes inland and depopulating villages that could no longer farm. The Veluwe became a barren interior, useful mainly for sheep and game. The modern forest is mostly a 19th- and 20th-century replanting for timber, which is why it leans heavily toward conifers in even rows. The dunes still drift in places, including some of the largest active sand fields in Europe.

There is one industry the Veluwe's geology suited perfectly: paper. The sandy soil filters rainwater into clean springs, and during the Eighty Years' War (1568-1648) the supply of paper from northern France collapsed. Dutch entrepreneurs dug channels - beken - to power water mills along the Veluwe's eastern flank, mostly around Apeldoorn. By the 17th century, scores of paper mills were grinding rags into pulp here, supplying the printing presses of Amsterdam and the publishing houses that made the Dutch Republic an information superpower. Most of those mills are gone now, demolished or converted to laundries, but a handful still turn, kept running by volunteers.

King-Stadtholder William III chose the eastern Veluwe for his country palace in the 1680s. Het Loo, at Apeldoorn, was designed to rival Versailles - its fountains were engineered to throw water higher than the French ones - and the Dutch royal family used it as a residence until 1975. The northwest edge of the Veluwe runs through the Dutch Bible Belt, a strip of conservative Reformed villages where Sunday observance still empties the streets. And at the heart of the region sits Hoge Veluwe National Park, the oldest in the Netherlands and the only stretch of the Veluwe that charges admission. Cycling and hiking are the natural verbs here. The distances between towns are larger than elsewhere in the country, which by Dutch standards means you might pedal twenty kilometers between coffee stops.

The Veluwe carries Europe's largest population of red deer, along with wild boar, roe deer, and reintroduced mouflon. In 2019 a wolf settled here - the first to den in the Netherlands in roughly 140 years - and the small pack has grown since. The Kroondomein Het Loo, the royal hunting estate adjoining the national park, is closed to the public for most of the year so the wildlife is left undisturbed. Game appears on local menus too: Planken Wambuis, between Ede and Arnhem, has built a reputation on Veluwe venison and forageables, the kind of cooking that takes the landscape's vocabulary and puts it on a plate.