For most of its history, the most important fact about Westerwolde was what you could not do here. You could not march an army through the raised bogs that filled the region. You could not collect taxes from people you could not reach. You could not move bulk goods overland through swampland that swallowed wagons. The bogs made this corner of Groningen a buffer between the Dutch and the Germans, between Catholics and Protestants, between Groningen city and the Prince-Bishopric of Munster. The bogs are mostly gone now, drained and turned into farmland, but the borderland character has not entirely faded.
On the first of January 2018, the municipalities of Vlagtwedde and Bellingwedde joined together to form a new municipality called Westerwolde. The merger consolidated about thirty villages and hamlets under a single local government, with administrative headquarters in Sellingen. The new arrangement matched a geographic name that had always meant something to people in the region - Westerwolde was a coherent landscape long before it became a coherent municipality. Some definitions also include Stadskanaal in Westerwolde, but Stadskanaal is more closely associated with the Veenkolonien, the peat colony region just to the north, and is usually treated separately. The largest village in the new municipality is Ter Apel, home to about 6,000 people. The other main centers are Vlagtwedde, Sellingen, Bellingwolde, and Blijham.
Two fortified villages dominate Westerwolde's tourist literature. Bourtange is the famous one, a five-bastioned star fort completed in 1593 to control the only road through the swamps from Germany to Groningen. The restoration completed in 1992 made it one of the best-preserved star forts in Europe. Oudeschans is the lesser-known sibling - a smaller fortified settlement that protected a separate access route on the northern edge of the region. Both forts illustrate the same logic: when your terrain is mostly impassable, you only need to defend the few places where it isn't. The Eighty Years' War made these chokepoints strategic; modern agriculture has made them historical curiosities; tourism has made them economic assets. The chain of small fortifications along the German border once formed a coordinated defensive network for the three northern Dutch provinces.
Like much of Groningen and neighboring Drenthe, Westerwolde is laced with canals. The Ruiten-Aa-kanaal is the main waterway, threading north-south through the region and dotted with locks and many manually-operated bridges. These canals were not built for tourists. They were built to transport peat - the dense organic fuel cut from the bogs and shipped to cities to be burned. Whole towns grew along the canal banks because that was where the peat was loaded and the workers lived. As the peat ran out and coal and gas replaced it, the canals lost their economic function. Today they support pleasure boating instead, with rental boats from Ter Apel and Bourtange and a steady summer traffic of canal cruisers working through the locks. The bridges still open by hand for them.
The defining landscape of Westerwolde was once the raised bog: a peat formation that rose above the surrounding water table, fed only by rainfall, building up over millennia of partially decomposed sphagnum moss. Raised bogs are inhospitable to most plants and almost all agriculture. They are also remarkably effective at preserving things - bog bodies from the Iron Age, wooden trackways from the Bronze Age, pollen records that let scientists reconstruct ancient climates. Most of the Westerwolde bogs were systematically drained between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries to extract peat and reclaim land for cultivation. What remains are scattered patches of bog landscape protected by the Groninger Landschap foundation and other organizations - small reminders of what most of the region looked like five hundred years ago, when bog rather than field defined the eastern frontier of the Dutch Republic.
Westerwolde remains one of the more remote corners of the Netherlands. There is no railway station in the region. The nearest stations are in Winschoten to the north and Emmen to the south, both requiring a bus connection of half an hour or more. From Schiphol Airport the drive is about two and a half hours, mostly along the A37 motorway through Emmen. None of the European motorways actually pass through Westerwolde itself, though the German A31 Autobahn runs parallel to the border just across in Lower Saxony. For travelers willing to make the effort, the reward is a landscape that has resisted the development pressures common in the western Netherlands, with quiet villages, intact agricultural countryside, the Ruiten-Aa flowing through it, and the silhouette of Bourtange waiting in the east.
Located at approximately 52.99 N, 7.14 E in the southeast corner of Groningen province, Netherlands, along the German border. The region covers roughly 270 square kilometers and includes about 30 villages and hamlets. Nearest commercial airport is Groningen Airport Eelde (EHGG), about 50 km west of Sellingen. Bremen Airport (EDDW) is about 120 km east. Westerwolde is recognizable from altitude by the patchwork of small fields, threading canals (most notably the Ruiten-Aa), and the unmistakable star shape of Bourtange near the eastern border. The terrain is essentially flat with only minor glacial moraines breaking the polder.