The land here has been inhabited since the eleventh century, when peat farmers cleared the bogs and discovered, as their drainage worked, that they were sinking the ground below the level of the surrounding water. From that bargain onwards the area's history has been dike maintenance. Between 1619 and 1811 a cluster of villages - Ransdorp, Zunderdorp, Schellingwoude, Landsmeer, Broek in Waterland, and Zuiderwoude - formed the Waterland Union, a confederation whose main reason for existing was sharing the cost and labor of keeping the sea on the correct side of the dike. Monnickendam, then a more powerful town with a bailiff of its own, stayed independent. In 1921 three of the union villages were absorbed by an expanding Amsterdam. The modern municipality of Waterland was assembled much later, in 1991, by merging Broek in Waterland, Katwoude, Marken, and Monnickendam, with Monnickendam as its seat.

Fly across Waterland on a clear day and the geometry is startling. Every field is a rectangle. Every rectangle is bordered by a ditch. The ditches drain to wider canals, the canals drain to pumping stations, and the pumping stations lift water up into the Markermeer or out through the IJ into the sea. Most of the municipality sits between one and two meters below sea level. If the pumps stop, the polders refill within weeks. The pastures that look so soft and traditional are an industrial system held in equilibrium by machinery, and the cows that stand on them are part of a Dutch dairy economy that goes back roughly seven hundred years. The local farms still ship milk to the regional creameries; some of it ends up in cheeses sold across Europe and Asia.

The municipality's seat, Monnickendam, was a serious harbor town in the seventeenth century - it sent eel boats out into the Zuiderzee and brought back fish for the Amsterdam markets. The town gave the world Pieter Floriszoon, a Dutch vice admiral who died in 1658 fighting the Swedes in the Battle of the Sound, one of the larger naval engagements of his century. East of Monnickendam, across a short causeway, sits the old fishing island of Marken, now a peninsula. North a bit further is Katwoude, a hamlet known mostly for the historic windmill De Kathammer that still stands on its dike. All three places face the Markermeer, which until 1932 was part of the Zuiderzee, an arm of the North Sea. The Afsluitdijk barrier closed the inlet, the inland water turned fresh, and the fishing economy that had supported these villages for centuries quietly ended within a generation.

Waterland is one of the most cycled corners of a country that cycles everywhere. The terrain helps - dead flat, almost without exception - but the network is what really makes it work. Dedicated bike paths follow the tops of every dike. Hand-cranked pole ferries cross the smaller canals. You can ride from Amsterdam Centraal to Marken in a long afternoon, passing through Broek in Waterland and Monnickendam and Volendam on the way, and never share the road with a car for more than a few hundred meters at a time. The bike pace turns out to be the right pace for the landscape, which reveals itself slowly: a heron in a ditch, a windmill on the next polder, the curve of a dike that has been holding the same line since the seventeenth century. Peter Spier, the Dutch-American children's book illustrator who won the 1978 Caldecott Medal for Noah's Ark, grew up here in Broek in Waterland. His drawings of cluttered, populated, lovingly detailed scenes have a quality that anyone who has biked this region will recognize - the sense that everything in the picture is doing something, and has been doing it for a long time.