In the Noordoostpolder , we have three TOPs. A TOP stands for Toeristisch OverstapPunt (Tourist Transfer Point). A TOP is the perfect starting point for your cycling or walking tour. There is always ample (and free!) parking at a TOP, making it easy to continue on foot or by bike. There is also often a catering establishment nearby.
A TOP can be recognised by its 3-metre-high corten steel column. This column displays both a map of the area and various cycling and hiking routes that you can follow from here. These routes link up perfectly with the national network of cycle junctions. If you have already selected a walking route or cycle route on this website, you can download the gpx file of it and put it on your navigation device, so that you can easily follow the route with that too.
Besides the TOPs, you will also come across two types of marker poles in the landscape while driving through the Noordoostpolder . The first type of marker poles are called crash poles. These mark the locations where a plane crashed or made an emergency landing in World War II. This usually involves an Allied plane, but it could also have been a German plane. You can recognise the crash poles by the three-metre-high blue and white pole with a bright red plane on it.
Read more about our crash posts
The second kind of marker poles you encounter along the way are also three metres high, also painted blue and white, but with a bright red ship on top. These poles mark the locations where shipwrecks have been discovered. After all, where the Noordoostpolder is now, the Zuiderzee once raged wildly and a ship sometimes sank. Some of these ships have been excavated, but a large part lies preserved in the landscape, so you usually don't see anything of the wreck itself, which is why it is marked with such a marker pole.
Read more about our marker posts
Besides shipwrecks and crashed planes, there is much more interesting stuff in the landscape of the Noordoostpolder der that is no longer visible. But that is certainly not why we have forgotten it. To keep those historical locations and events alive, 12 vista panels have been placed all over the Noordoostpolder . A vista panel is a corten steel frame with a transparent plate. on which an object or activity is projected onto the landscape in 3D with a drawing. A vista panel is dedicated to the shipwrecks and plane crashes mentioned above, but also, for example, to the living quarters in which the polder workers lived and to the drowned villages that, like Urk and Schokland, were located here in the late Middle Ages.
Discover all 12 vista panels in the Noordoostpolder der
