From around 1400 the Dutch adapted the windmill to drive scoop wheels and, later, Archimedean screws that lifted water out of low-lying land into ringed canals and onward to the sea. Chains of mills could raise water in stages, allowing whole lakes and marshes to be pumped dry and farmed. The technique made systematic land reclamation possible and reshaped the landscape of Holland into a patchwork of drained polders. The mill village of Kinderdijk preserves nineteen eighteenth-century drainage mills.
Wind drainage turned reclamation from local ditch-digging into large-scale landscape engineering and became emblematic of Dutch control over water.
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