I fancied a new daily driver, something reasonably sensible (well, as sensible as I'm ever going to get), rare, quick: A Lancia.
A little bit of a Summer break too, so off to Holland we went.
Although we flew there quite quickly It is also just an overnight ferry crossing from the UK and on the edge of mainland Europe.
The Netherlands roughly translates to 'Low lands' because 20% of the land is below sea level with some 50% being less than 1m above it. They are hemmed in by other countries so when they needed more land they had to re-claim it from the sea and marshlands. It is a very flat country which grows a lot of produce.
Because much of The Netherlands or Holland is below sea level they have to constantly pump water out otherwise it would quickly flood, sounds crazy, but they have made it work for a long time now.
The sea is held back by banks called Dikes, but it obviously seeps through, mainly underground.
It's currently pumped out by electric, but for many years it was done by windmills. Basically they split all the land up (this includes the fields, towns, small villages even housing estates) by small water courses. Even though they have a normal sized road system, in many areas you can also come out of your house, jump into a small boat and whizz off to see your friend a couple of blocks away.
Here is a model someone did of how the basics work:
There are (just) three windmills there, the one on the right pulls the water up from the lowest level, it goes around the water course until the one in the centre pulls it up onto the next level, then onto the the one at the left and so on until it's high enough to be pumped back to the sea.
You can see they are using water wheels, here's a working drawing:
This was eventually superseded by the Archimedes screw type:
They are now made from steel of course, but were first made from wood, one of the originals still exists - just about!
A current one:
Windmills were originally made from wood and this one is mainly apart from the brick outer and steel mainshaft, here is a shot looking up into the roof where you can see how horizontal motion is converted to vertical:
The wind comes from different directions and different speeds, to allow for these changes the keeper has to get out on the balcony to spin the whole top piece around to face the wind and put sheets behind the sails to catch it, the sails are just lats of wood, you can put a twist on them by tightening a rope.
Brief footage of it in action:
