IJMUIDEN LAAG VUURTOREN
Ijmuiden, Netherlands
Over here in the United States, we use a pair of lights in tandem called range lights to mark the safe channel into a bay, port, harbor, etc. In the Netherlands, they have the same concept, but a different name. They are called Hoog and Laag for high and low. My first encounter with this pair was in Ijmuiden, a rather large and unsightly industrial city with lots of channels and waterways cutting inland. Naturally there are a number of drawbridges you must traverse in order to travel from south to north and vice versa. These drawbridges don't actually 'draw', they spin around so that they are parallel to the waterway and over to one side. Slow is the key word here.
Anyway, I found myself driving around looking for these until I ended up down on this road that went out to the end of some peninsula with hotels on it. I finally saw the lights behind me and you can see them both in the picture below. It took a while to eventually navigate around to get up to both of them.
Ijmuiden Laag was constructed in 1878 and first lit on February 19th, 1879. The little red tower stands approximately 24 meters high and stands on a small bluff over looking the entrance to the Noordzeekanaal, which slices across to the Markermeer at Amsterdam. It was nice to find such an excellent pair of range lights but I was glad to get out of this city. It had an industrial strength smell to it. Everything was a shade of petroleum.
Here's how I saw it:
OF THE MOUNTAINS
John B Caddell
Copyright 2001