Watchtower

Approximately six meters high, you stand above the landscape when you have conquered all the wooden steps. Views are fascinating, especially because you can now clearly see how the Mussel Aa moves through the landscape: not as a straight line, but as a butterfly finding its way: capricious, meandering or "meandering", as Jelka Vale, forester at the Forestry Commission, describes it.

If you don't know it, you won't see it, but in this area the landscape has been significantly modified in recent years: ash trees have been raised with soil from the area, hedgerows thinned, stream forests formed, straight streams warped again. The nature restoration of the Valley of the Ruiten Aa was carried out on the basis of the course of the stream on old topographical maps. The nature of the past is slowly returning.

Natuurmagazine Roots