Jacob van Lennep route, Part 10 (Zoutkamp - Delfzijl)

Monday June 23. Van Lennep and Van Hogendorp walk through the Hogeland. In Zuurdijk they visit a widow to see her beautiful farm. They are welcomed with a bitter and each receives a pipe. Yet Van Lennep writes:"The owner was old and ugly, dressed simply and spoke in a very unpleasant Flat German dialect.\\\" The fact that the Netherlands was still a class society in 1823 is also reflected in the language. The elite spoke generally civilized Dutch, but the 'simple' people only spoke their local dialect. Frisian, Groningen and other regional languages were sometimes difficult to understand for the Dutchman Van Lennep.

Groningen butter
They walk through cornfields to Pieterburen, Den Andel and Warffum. Here Van Hogendorp is having a discussion with a girl about the quality of her butter and the Leiden. Ultimately, the woman lets him taste her butter, which to the travelers' surprise is clearly better than "(...) the usually tasteless Groningen butter."

Length measurement
After an overnight stay in Uithuizen, the next day they walk past the Menkemaborg, one of the few still existing Groningen borgs. Van Lennep writes about the diking of the Noordpolder. He uses a local measure: the Groningen rod, which was 4.116 meters. Other sizes were also used in the Netherlands, such as the Rhineland rod (3.767 meters). By the way, King William I had already introduced the Dutch metric system a few years earlier. Apparently it took some time before arithmetic in this new length measure was generally adopted. Just as some people still convert euro amounts back to guilders.

Floor sources
-Jakob van Lennep," The summer of 1823": part 1, chapter 8.
-Geert Mak, The summer of 1823 as a television series : episode 4.
-Maya Schepers, The summer of 1823 as a radio series : episode 4.