De Hulk, Scharwoude

Who knew that the Hulk was Dutch! But joking aside, this is a lovely little park close to Hoorn, with waterways, sniffy grass routes, play areas and very few people, what more can you want?

Situated between a major road and the train line, De Hulk is a decent sized park with clearly marked pathways. There are two extra loops you can make to extend your walk and these are not paved or maintained in any way, so if you want to do this, then be prepared to fight space with brambles and nettles, and the occasional mud patch. Your dog however, will love you for making the effort.

There are two exits to walk in this car park. One is at the back on the left as you drive in, near the notice board and this just takes you to a camp site. The one you want is the long pathway on the right as you drive in. It’s a small parking space, probably maximum 20 cars so you can’t miss the path.

There is a right turn close after the first bridge, this takes you to a little dead end kind of picnic area that is just full of duck poop. I tend to ignore it but feel free to check it out.

To walk the perimeter, walk up to the bridge from the car park, then go to the open space on the right, follow the lake round until you meet a bike path. Go left along the bike path for a while until you get back into the footpath areas. After this it’s difficult to loose your way. If you want to avoid a bike path then just continue on the path from the car park.

Further along you will see an unpaved pathway to the right which does have grass mown (not the little one with the gate near the path, but just after that), it does not look like much but this is a nice little extension – you can weave in and out of these little parallel paths and then come back on yourself to carry on. It will add a good 15 minutes to your walk, more if you stop and sniff everything :). But it is not maintained, there are nettles and brambles to get caught up on.

Cross the larger bridge over the river/canal to the other side of the park, and walk all around it up to the main road, zig-zag a bit through the pathways in a big loop and when you come back to the bridge, instead of following the same paved pathway that you came on, go to the right and walk right next to the railway line. It’s a bit wild there but in summer they do cut the grass about twice in the year. I only ever met one other person on this side of the walk in the last year!

Before you go over the last bridge back to the car park, on your right is another little bridge taking you to a small island, it’s another little loop you can do to extend your walk. I usually take it, my dog seems to find it interesting enough.

If you add both loops you can extend the whole walk to a little over an hour before you run out of new paths to take. But the good thing is, if the weather is terrible you can cut this short easily and run back. Alternatively there are plenty of trees to shelter under…

Note there is only one bin for poop bags and that is right by the car park.

Free parking is at the Parkeerplaats aan de Zesstedenweg (1634) De Hulk, Zesstedenweg, Scharwoude.