High winds tore up the dunes and made the sea wild in the first days of January 1647. The sand was forced out of the way to show something in the subsoil that should never have been there: stone. There is no stone at all on the coast near Domburg; there is only sand, peat, clay. So someone must have brought the blocks on the foreshore from far away – from seven hundred kilometres away in the quarries of northern France as we now know – and moving it must have been serious business; one stone weighed two tons and no machine in 1647 could shift it. An excited letter to Amsterdam, which went into
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