Editing Groesbeek (section)

==Geography==
Groesbeek and [[Kranenburg, North Rhine-Westphalia|Kranenburg]] are situated on the banks of the Groesbeek, a small stream in the Groesbeek valley, a large valley between the [[Nijmeegse heuvelrug]] and [[Klever Reichswald|Reichswald]]. The Groesbeek valley was carved out by glaciers during the Saale glacial, marking the southernmost expansion of ice-age glaciers in the Netherlands. The hills surrounding the valley in which Groesbeek lies are technically the terminal moraines of those glaciers, but in contrast to the hills in the central and eastern Netherlands, these hills are rising by 0.5-0.8&nbsp;mm/year due to [[tectonic uplift]].

Due to this, the topography is much more varied here than in other higher grounds with similar origins in the Netherlands.
Finally, during the [[Younger Dryas]] stadial, large amounts of [[loess]] were deposited in the valley, making it extremely fertile, while the hills around it are composed to this day of sandy loam unsuitable for intensive agriculture, so that the area has been covered with thick forests to this day. This contributed to the isolation of the area, especially considering the extent of the forests in the Middle Ages was much larger than today. The isolation of the valley was only alleviated by the arrival of the railway in 1865 and finally lifted in the [[interbellum]] by the construction of a high capacity paved road to nearby [[Nijmegen]].