Frisia Coast Trail.com

When re-enactors bring early-medieval Frisia to life, they are often seen wearing a small iron hammer on a leather cord around their...

Haubargs . Cathedral-like farmsteads with hipped roofs soaring up to twenty meters high, icons of the Eiderstedt peninsula in the region...

Who’s afraid of Jóða Fenris , 'the offspring of Fenrir'? Afraid of hund hrynsævar hræva , 'the hound of the roaring sea of corpses'? Who, today, fears the wolf? The dark creature that once haunted the shadowed forests of the East is rising again in Europe. Nearly two centuries have passed, yet the wolf has returned to the southern shores of the North Sea. Returned to former Frisia, rekindling ancient fears thought long extinguished. It is killing sheep. More unsettling still,

Let’s go to the omega. To the end of the Frisia Coast Trail . To Ribe in southern Jutland, Denmark. The oldest town in Scandinavia. A town located on the banks of the Ribe Å. A modest river that flows out into the Wadden Sea stoically slow, opposite the islands of Fanø and Mandø. Ribe started as a seasonal marketplace. Year-round settlement began around the year 700. Everything in peaceful times yet. Only with the raid on the island of Lindisfarne in Northumberland in 793 did

Dockyards, quays, terminals, warehouses, wharves, anchorages, lighthouses, and beacons. Craftsmen, shipping companies, customs offices,...

Hiking demands careful preparation, especially when it comes to personal safety. What is in your First Aid Kit? Do you have basic first...

'In the navy', a song by the Village People. Of the small villages along the southern coast of the North Sea. A water people once united in the mythical Seven Sealands . Moreover, a people who laid the foundations of two of history’s most impressive navies: that of the Kingdom of England and that of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. It should not come as a surprise we are talking about Frisians. In spite of the Latin saying Frisia non cantat  ‘Frisia does not sing

The heart of Western democracies is the joint assembly of Parliament, Cabinet, and High Councils of State. Its Celtic-Germanic origin is the thing , also called ting , ding , or þing  in other writings. Today, national assemblies in Scandinavian countries still refer to this ancient tradition. For example, the parliaments of the Faroes Løgting , of Greenland Landsting , of Iceland Alþingi , and of Norway Storting . However, the oldest written attestation of the thing  institu

At the end of the eighth century, by decree of Charlemagne and under the supervision of the wise men Wlemar and Saxmund, the customary law of the Frisians was codified. It is called the Lex Frisionum . Its jurisdiction included the land between the Flehum and Sincfalam rivers 'between Vlie and Sincfalam River'. The River Flehum flowed into the North Sea, where the sea strait Vlie is located today, between the islands of Terschelling and Vlieland. Sincfalam , also written as

In 1934, while dredging the River Scheldt near the village of Appels in the region of Flanders, workers unearthed an extraordinary ship’s figurehead (see featured image above). Dated to around AD 400, scholars generally agree it is Germanic in origin and hails from the southern North Sea coast. Yet, to this day, no people or nation has laid rightful claim to this remarkable carving. The Vikings may come to mind, but they only began their raids four centuries later—so, these n

If you want to track down who killed the whale, the Frisia Coast Trail  region is the place to start. Stop people on the streets along this southern North Sea littoral and ask whether they know anything, and you will likely hear: “I hear nothing, I see nothing, I know nothing.” Politicians and officials—say, in The Hague—will lament that they have no recollection of the affair. Better call them all Ishmael. In this blog post, we set out the unvarnished truth: how the peoples

In 2004, archaeologists made a remarkable discovery at the early medieval burial ground of Solleveld, just south of the city of The Hague: a boat grave. It lies almost exactly two hundred kilometres in a straight line due east across the North Sea from the legendary ship burial at Sutton Hoo. With this extraordinary find, the Netherlands joined the select group of nations known for ship burials—a distinction not to be taken lightly. National pride soared. The discovery also e

Over the past few years, we have written about the tall, strange-looking people who live in that twilight zone  between sea and land—the coastal strip along the southern shores of the North Sea. Lately, however, the repetitive long-calls alerted us to a blind spot: we forgot all about the iconic animal of that same zone—the seagull. The co-existence of humans and gulls is anything but simple. Opinions diverge wildly, from unalloyed admiration to utter disgust. In this blog po

The earliest evidence of Frisian merchants—or kāpmon  in the Old Frisian language—engaging in the slave trade dates back to the first half of the seventh century. No less an authority than the Venerable Bede, the Father of English history, recorded this criminal activity. He described a merchant operating in the markets of London who also dealt in slaves. As Fleming (2010) puts it: “Frisian slavers in hopes of swapping luxury goods for a little human flesh.” In this blog post

Latið meg ei á Frísaland fordervast!  This is the Faroese language, and its translation is: 'Do not let me perish in Friesland!' It is a cry of a Faroese young woman when she was being kidnapped by Frisian pirates somewhere in the Middle Ages. The question of this blog post is not about how on earth it was possible that the youth on the Faroe Islands had such a bad image of Friesland or Frisia. No. Instead, we will review the old Faroese sagas about Frisians. Faroese oral ac

Frisia could easily claim the title: land of Atlantis. 19 inhabited islands and 244 villages drowned along the old Frisian coast trail in the past 1,500 years. We bet there are more out there... Atlantis emerged in the writings of Greek philosopher Plato. That was around 350 BC. In two of his dialogues, the "Temaeus" and the "Critas", he mentions the lost city. Atlantis was not only known for its mysterious civilisation, but even more for its cataclysmic destruction some 7,

The arrival of the Romans in north-western Europe at the beginning of the Common Era, with the River Rhine as their northern frontier, marked the starting point for five centuries of widespread piracy. These raids affected not only the coasts of Britannia and northern Gaul but rippled as far as the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The heartland of this piracy was the coastal region stretching from the Lower River Rhine to the River Elbe, including parts of the inland—roughly

Is the seaport Maasvlakte the gateway to north-western Europe? No? How about Europoort? Still no? What about the Botlek port area? Or the...

On March 25, 2020, the coronavirus pandemic was climbing towards its second peak. There was uncertainty about how destructive the...

"Why am I late to class? Oh, you're gonna love this—there was this random cat in our barn this morning, right? Total stranger. And guess what? I stepped right in its poop . Yep. So before I could even think about school, I had to deal with the whole mess—literally scrubbing my shoes like it was a crime scene. That’s why I’m late, I swear!" A similar pretext was made by a group of Frisian sailors in the year 1040. These sea dogs claimed they had sailed to the North Pole, escap