Delft Itself

A night on the tiles!

We've both visited The Netherlands many times for business reasons and for holidays but somehow we've missed out on Delft. It's a pretty little town with an old compact centre ringed by canals - in fact it's a bit like a mini Amsterdam. We stayed in a garret for three nights, well it was quite a roomy garret up three very steep flights of stairs overlooking a canal. It did the trick for us being a short walk from the train station, a short walk into the town centre and a slightly longer walk to the parkrun, our first in The Netherlands. Parkrun hasn't quite taken off yet over here but here there were around 60 runners and walkers trundling round a lovely green park,

Early morning stroll - don't fall in the canal!

 Heading to the left of our front door  and over the road took me along a quiet  canal side walk towards the Oud Kerk.  The Nieuwe Kerk (the New Church -  getting on for 400 feet of height in the  town square) is old enough and dates  from 1398 but the old one beats that by  a fair way. At that time most of the  tallest structures in Europe consisted of  church towers in what are now Belgium  and the Netherlands, the burghers of  Delft were keen that their church should  be on the list but when the tower was  over half way built it started to lean at  an angle, apparently they'd built on top  of an old in-filled canal. Undeterred they  built the remaining bit vertically and it's  stayed up ever since - but you can see  there's a kink in it. My photo shows it  leaning a little to the right. Just to pre-  empt any question about the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Oud Kerk tower is about 50 feet higher. We went a bit gung ho on churches in Delft and also visited the ancient St Hippolytus chapel for a mass (in Dutch) and the larger and rather magnificent Catholic church of St Maria Jessekerk, which together with the Oud and Nieuwe churches is also in the top ten tall churches in South Holland.