Geopad 096-Baarn Roosterbos

Anyone who wants to get to know the old Roosterbos on foot is advised to take the 5.5-kilometer hiking route described below.
The route begins and ends at the parking lot at the NS railway station in Baarn. This means that those who wish to follow it must pass through a shady villa district both before and after the forest walk. The intention is for the route to be traversed through the villa district in both directions. The beautiful architecture found there can then be experienced again and again from a different perspective.

1. For the walk through the Roosterbos, you first pass through the villa district west of the station. In this context, you walk left along the Gerrit van der Veenlaan for a short distance. A bridge over the railway embankment dug out in Baarn leads you into the villa district, where you immediately turn diagonally right. The Brug and Prinses Marielaan, which are aligned with each other, then take you to the Amsterdamse Straatweg, which you cross.

2. On the opposite side of the Amsterdamse Straatweg, you can directly enter the early 18th-century Roosterbos. The forest grows mostly on a sandy terrace, whose highest point is about 13 meters above sea level.
This guide first deals with the sandy paths leading to the southwestern point of the Roosterbos. Among these paths, there is a forgotten old connection to Lage Vuursche and Utrecht, which is remembered by both the name and the route of the Old Utrechtse Weg in the built-up area of Baarn.
After a left curve, you arrive at an intersection with a forest path that connects the converging paths. At this intersection, the Geopad turns right.
Anyone who has looked around carefully will have seen a bowl in the forest here and there. Such bowls appear in several places in the forest and may have been formed by melting water. Their distribution has not yet been systematically recorded.

3. After the forest path, you follow a subsequent path that bends to the left, which passes through a zone with (some) bowls after about one hundred meters. Shortly thereafter, you turn left at one of the converging forest paths. This is a straight avenue, which you soon leave again by turning left at the next intersection. Soon you will pass a prominent burial mound on your right.

4. Shortly behind this mound, the route turns right. It then runs briefly alongside a piece of land located in the middle of the forest, which was mostly excavated long ago. This land is only marked by a small mound along the forest path you are now following. At the end of the forest path, there is a T-junction with a gently curving sandy path, where you return left to the straight avenue you briefly walked earlier. It brings you to the southwestern corner of the forest, where you can explore the southern surroundings of the swimming pool on the other side of the Domlaan and its parallel street.

Anyone who does not feel the need to do so can now return to Baarn via another part of the Roosterbos. Section 5 can be skipped in this case.

5. The southern surroundings of the swimming pool are explored via a circular path, where up until now appealing relief from later locally eroded old wind deposits can be seen.
On your right, the circular path first leads you to the paved Wittelaan, on the opposite side of which the path runs along the edge of the swimming pool's premises. After about two hundred meters, the Geopad turns left, which it soon does again. The surroundings then transition to a piece of forest with trough-like (depositional) depressions. All the while, you will return to the Wittelaan, which is crossed again. After that, the Geopad runs along the south side of a triangular piece of woodland, where a prominent round hill is hidden in a dune-like depression. A little further on, the circular path described in this section ends again at the spot where it began.

6. You are now exploring the Roosterbos again towards Baarn via another route. This happens via the sand path farthest to the right of the cluster of connections, which ends at the southwestern corner of the forest. About six hundred meters further, the path runs along the trench of the land mentioned in Section 4, until it reaches a left curve. At the curve, you will see a clearing with a burial mound on your right.
Burial mound

7. The sand path then brings you back to the Amsterdamse Straatweg. You must now briefly follow this left to land again at the Baarn station via the Prins Marie, Brug, and Gerrit van der Veenlaan.