West-Vlieland (also known as Westeyende) () was a village on the island of

Vlieland (; ) is a municipality and island in the northern Netherlands. The municipality of Vlieland is the second most sparsely populated municipality in the Netherlands, after Schiermonnikoog. Vlieland is one of the West Frisian Islands, lying in t ...

in the province of

Friesland Friesland ( ; ; official ), historically and traditionally known as Frisia (), named after the Frisians, is a Provinces of the Netherlands, province of the Netherlands located in the country's northern part. It is situated west of Groningen (p ...

, the

Netherlands , Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...

. It was gradually lost to the advance of the sea, by 1736 only two houses remained. The site of the village was in 1857 15

fathom A fathom is a unit of length in the imperial and the U.S. customary systems equal to , used especially for measuring the depth of water. The fathom is neither an international standard (SI) unit, nor an internationally accepted non-SI unit. H ...

s (27 m) below sea level.Francis Allen (1857), Het eiland Vlieland en zijne bewoners (in Dutch, scan available in Project Gutenberg) The village had its own town hall, church, school,

poorhouse A poorhouse or workhouse is a government-run (usually by a county or municipality) facility to support and provide housing for the dependent or needy. Workhouses In England, Wales and Ireland (but not in Scotland), "workhouse" has been the more ...

and a mill which was built in 1647 (in Dutch) and by 1670 it had between 2.000 and 2.500 inhabitants, making it a large and prosperous village. Half a century later it counted only 750 people. Many of the inhabitants worked on the seas, whaling or trading on the Baltic Sea. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the town had a famous bar and a military storage. At the end of the 17th century the village began to decline: in a few decades the plague visited the village multiple times, sailors were increasingly assailed by Dunkirker pirates, and the village began to be increasingly difficult to reach due to sand accumulation while the village itself was slowly devoured by the seas. All of this led to East Vlieland increasingly outcompeting its neighbour until West-Vlieland disappeared entirely.

References

External links

Het tragische verhaal van West-Vlieland (The tragic story of West-Vlieland)
nl) Populated places in Friesland Former populated places in the Netherlands {{Friesland-geo-stub