The church plan
The lost building's shape marked in stones on the ground.
Michielverbeek โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Johan Bakker โ CC BY-SA 3.0 nl ยท Ymblanter โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Ymblanter โ CC BY-SA 4.0
An exceptionally well-preserved medieval town that tourists rarely reach: surviving walls and water gates, the best known being the Koppelpoort spanning the canal, inner canals with distinctive rear walls called muurhuizen found nowhere else in the Netherlands, and the birthplace of the painter Piet Mondrian, a museum today. Twenty minutes by train from Utrecht and everything in it is walkable.
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The Onze-Lieve-Vrouwetoren in Amersfoort rises about ninety-eight metres, the third-tallest church tower in the Netherlands โ but the strange thing about it is that it is a tower without a church. The church it stood over vanished in a single moment: in 1787 an army powder magazine that had been placed inside the church exploded, destroying the building entirely while the tower alone survived because it was structurally separate. The floor was left empty, and the plan of the lost church is marked out in stones on the ground around the tower โ so you see its shape without seeing it. The tower itself has an unexpected importance: its central point was the origin on which the entire Dutch geodetic survey network was built in 1799, meaning every modern Dutch map has its coordinates calculated from this tower. It is climbed on a guided tour to the gallery overlooking Amersfoort and its countryside.
The lost building's shape marked in stones on the ground.
Amersfoort and its countryside from 98 metres.
Lieve Vrouwekerkhof, 3811 Amersfoort