AT A GLANCE
Why go?
The Leewal Walk Through Time (Tijdreisroute Leewal) is a 7.5 km circular hike between the villages of Exloo and Odoorn, on the Hondsrug ridge in Drenthe, Netherlands. Designed as a UNESCO Geopark trail, it pitches itself as a journey through 470,000 years of landscape history, threading through forests, open heath and drift sand past ice-age relics, ancient field systems and a megalithic grave.↗↗
What makes it distinctive is the way the trail layers story onto scenery: a timeline sculpture and a mammoth-themed sign system turn a pleasant woodland-and-heath walk into an outdoor lesson on the ice ages. Along the way you cross the enigmatic Leewal ridge, encounter the weathered dolmen known as Hunebed D31, and can deepen the experience with a 360-degree companion app about the woolly mammoth and sabre-toothed tiger that once roamed here.↗↗
A landscape shaped by ice
The route unfolds across three nature areas that give the walk its varied feel: the Molenveld, the Odoornerdennen and the larger Hunzebos. Heather and pine alternate with mossy, twisted oak, and open stretches of drift sand break up the woodland. From a low rise in the Molenveld the view sweeps out over the flat surrounding land, easy enough to imagine the herds that grazed it long before the villages existed.
