Schokland and Surroundings,Netherlands.

For more than six thousand years,the struggle of the people of the Netherlands against water has endured and still continues today. Without constant vigilance, more than half the present area of the country would have submerged or subjected to periodic inundation. Schokland was a peninsula that by the fifteenth century had become an island. Occupied and then abandoned as the sea encroached, it had to be evacuated in 1859. Following man made dams and  dikes for water drainage work,  it has formed part of the land reclaimed from the sea since the 1940s. Schokland has vestiges of human habitation going back to prehistoric times. It symbolises the heroic, age-old struggle of the people of the Netherlands against the encroachment of the water. As a result of the colossal reclamation programme that began in the early years of the 20th century, Schokland and the settlement mounds and other human interventions that surround it stand as mute testimony to the skill and fortitude of the Dutch people in the face of this never-ceasing natural threat.
This scenic card was sent by Mike.Thank you very much.
Date of Inscription: 1995