Hello! Today, I’m inviting you to join me on a little outing to do with Drenthe Heath sheep and their wool. Our destination is the Dwingelderveld National Park, a little over an hour’s cycling from our home. Below, you can see a felted(!) aerial view of the park, with purple heathland, green forest and paler felt for the surrounding open fields. The red arrow points to our destination – the visitor centre.
This is the little wooden yurt-shaped model of the building in its felt landscape:
And here it is in real life:
On this special day, the green-roofed visitor centre is surrounded by a small market. As the first visitor to arrive, I’m given the honour of starting the Wild Weaving project, using wool from the flock as well as twigs, grasses and other plant materials.
It’s a start, and I’m sure many hands big and small will add to the tapestry during the day.
Now, let’s take look round the market. There are several stalls with hand-knit items…
… and hand-spun yarn.
One stall with refurbished spinning wheels, and several with items made from felt, like these beautiful felt wall panels by Viltpracht.
And a stall showcasing all the natural colours of the Drenthe Heath sheep fleeces.
This stall holder (sorry, I don’t know her name or website) has an antique carding machine. It probably dates from around 1850. It is basically a wooden trough studded with big tines. Some of the tines can be seen at the front (red arrow).
The wool is fed in from where the person operating it sits. Holding the wooden handle, she rocks the wooden ‘swing’ back and forth over the trough, and the wool is untangled by the tines. It comes out of the carder as fluffy flakes.
The fibres can then be more finely carded and aligned in an ordinary drum carder. Very interesting.
Listen, can you hear them? The sheep are calling us with their baa-ing. Let’s go and pay them a visit – it’s just a short walk from here. Ah, there they are in the distance.
Instead of being out on the heath, doing their jobs as conservation grazers, they’re staying closer to home at this time of year because they have lambs. The longer we stand here quietly, not moving or talking, the closer they come. The ewes of this breed also have horns, only smaller ones than the rams.
Mmmm, sunshine, total quiet apart from the bleating, that special sheepy woolly smell, a soft breeze – bliss.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this little outing. To close off, here are a few links:
- The wool market was a one-day event only, but the visitor centre is open all year round.
- Throughout 2024 there is an exhibition about the flock of Drenthe Heath sheep, and the felt aerial view of the Dwingelderveld National Park is always there, too.
- Information about the 4 sheep folds in the area can be found here.
- For those of you unable to visit in person, some of my older posts about this sheep breed can be read here, here and here.
- And a short video by a cyclist unexpectedly finding herself surrounded by the flock can be watched here on YouTube.
What a lovely scene! One more for my travel list.
Your list must be quite long by now. It really is a lovely place to visit.
Thanks for your blogpost and enthousiasm! Looking forward to welcome visitors to see those lovely sheep (and the lovely people working in the visitors centre of course:-)!
And thank you for organizing this wonderful day. Maybe we’ll meet again next year.