The Burcht: the Hill Leiden Was Built Around

The Netherlands is famously flat, which makes the hill in the middle of Leiden slightly absurd. It is artificial, about a thousand years old, and the city grew up around it. The climb takes two minutes. From the top, the old centre explains itself.

Practical first. The Burcht sits where the two arms of the Rhine meet, behind a sandstone gate off the Burgsteeg, in the middle of everything. It is open to the public, and the climb costs nothing — a ramp spirals up inside the ring wall. At the top you get the whole old centre in one look: the Hooglandse Kerk on one side, the Pieterskerk on the other, canals stitching between the rooftops. There is no better single spot for understanding how the city fits together. It is stop 17 on the walk, “the hill with two towers”.

Now the age, because it is the point. The Burcht is a motte — a refuge hill. In the ninth and tenth centuries, people here threw up a palisaded mound, the “Leitheriburch”, a place of retreat for families and their cattle when trouble came up the river. Around the year 1000 a wooden building stood on top. Through the eleventh century the hill was raised again and again; under Count Dirk VI of Holland the wooden fence became a tuff-stone ring wall. The first charter to name a burgrave of Leiden dates from 1143. Today the mound still stands about twelve metres above the streets, and the wall around the top runs some thirty-five metres across.

The hill kept the city’s records, too. In 1203 it starred in a family disaster: Ada, fifteen years old, newly Countess of Holland, was besieged inside this ring wall by her own uncle William. He took the hill, took her, and shipped her off to Texel. The fighting of those years smashed the wall; some of the brickwork in it is repair work from after that siege. By 1651 the city of Leiden had had enough of feudal landlords and simply bought the whole hill from the Van Wassenaer family for 70,000 guilders. It has belonged to the city since. National monument since 1969; the mound itself got its own archaeological listing in 2016.

One correction for the road, because someone nearby will tell you otherwise. Guides and legends like to make the hill Roman, or older still. The digs say no: no Roman layer, no Roman watch-house, nothing in the ground to support it. Probably wrong, the archaeologists conclude. The refuge hill is the record — a thousand years of it, which in the Netherlands counts as a mountain range.

Details worth two seconds on your way out: the wrought-iron foregate at the foot of the hill dates from 1653, and the stone lion above the gate was carved by Rombout Verhulst in 1662. The lion has been watching the shopping traffic ever since. It has seen everything.

Cost of the whole visit: nothing. Streets, bridges, hills — any daylight hour. What the view cannot tell you is why the burgraves, the countess and the cannon ended up on this exact spot, and what the two churches are really glaring about. That is what the walk is for. The full plan for a day of this: one day in Leiden.