Dolmens D53 and D54 - Darp

150 metres apart, on hunebedweg, at the bottom of Havelterberg, in Darp, you will find twin hunebeds: D53 and D54. D53 is one of the largest hunebeds in the Netherlands. During Professor Van Giffen's research in 1918, he found an abundance of pottery shards in the floor layers, which after extensive puzzling could be traced back to possibly more than 600 pots. But there was more, flint axes, an arrowhead, a hammer axe, beads of git and an amber. The biggest find in a Drenthe burial vault ever.

It's a good thing Professor Van Giffen had carefully mapped these dolmens in 1918. In 1945, the Germans wanted to demolish the hunebed because it was close to their constructed airfield and could thus be a landmark for Allied bombing raids. Fortunately, the professor was able to put a stop to this. With a dragline, the, now numbered, boulders of D53 were temporarily buried in a deep pit. Hunebed D54 was camouflaged. After the war, the boulders were dug out and the hunebeds restored to their former glory. The applied numbers are still visible on some of the stones.