History
Since the beginning of our era, the old course of the Rhine between Utrecht and Harmelen became increasingly more difficult to navigate. The building of a dam in the Kromme Rijn in 1122 led to a silting up of the old Rhine below Utrecht, especially as it meandered through very flat terrain.
Already in the early Middle Ages (ca. 700) a canal from Utrecht to Vleuten was dug. When the part Vleuten-Harmelen ultimately became too narrow and winding as well, in 1381 the Oude Rijn (Old Rhine) canal (Harmelen-Utrecht) was dug.
Under the expansion plans of the Utrecht city mayor Hendrick Moreelse in 1662-1665 a new shortcut was dug, the Leidse Rijn, connecting to where the Oude Rijn canal made a curve to the northeast. At the place where the new canal connected to the Oude Rijn the nobleman Everard Meyster built an estate called Oog in Al.
Eventually the name Leidse Rijn came to be used for the whole section Utrecht-Harmelen.
|
Read more about this topic: Leidse Rijn
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)