I couldn't see myself shinning up one of the birch, pine or oak trees. And there wouldn't be any point in running across this flat, heathy terrain. I saw no boar. Nothing broke the bird song and the distant rat-tat of a woodpecker except several clans of teenagers on bicycles, whooping and hollering and taking the width of the tarmac before them. Any sensible boar would stay well away from them.

I was in the Hoge Veluwe, the largest national park in the Netherlands. It celebrates its 75th birthday this year. A bus from Apeldoorn had delivered me to one of the gates and I was walking the four kilometres to the visitor centre. This being the Netherlands, the terrain was pretty flat, gently rolling at most, heather, grass, woodland, dunes, about 5500 hectares of it.

The park was founded in 1935 by a rich entrepreneur called Anton Kroeller. He and his wife, Helene Mueller, ploughed vast amounts of money into the place to restore the land and build up the populations of large mammals - the park has red deer, roe and mouflon as well as boar, and some of the red deer were originally imported from Scotland. The owners also accrued works of art and their famous collection is now on display in the Kroeller-Mueller Museum in the park.

With a population of 16.3 million in a relatively small area, the Netherlands is a crowded country. Parts of it - the cities and the coastal zone - certainly are, but in the east there is a considerable extent of more open countryside. Still, I thought, how does conservation fare here in comparison with what we do in the Highlands, where nature seems often to be coming in the door.

I received an insight into this when I visited Hans Kampf in his house in Soest. A slim, cheerful soul, he made me welcome, provided me with some lunch and told me something about a lifetime's work in conservation policy.

The modern period of conservation began with 1990 with the first Nature Policy Plan, which was accepted without much opposition by the Dutch Parliament. It proposed the establishment of a national ecological network. This was meant to link natural areas into a coherent whole.

As they were, many natural habitats existed in small fragments, isolated from each other. The network could join these up, increasing the biodiversity and connecting habitats to allow the movement of plants and animals.

A map of the ecological network now shows the Netherlands threaded with green - big core areas such as the Hoge Veluwe and thin veins running everywhere between them.

The 1990 plan has been refined in two major revisions, said Hans, the latest revision being completed just this year. The total expenditure on conservation is now one billion Euros a year - about 16 cents for each person each day, he explained, implying it is not much to pay for the unquantifiable benefits.

I was much taken by the so-called eco-corridors. The decision to make these more robust was taken during the first revision of the plan which had the title "Nature for People, People for Nature."

The eco-corridors are designed to connect conservation areas and counter the defragmentation by roads, rail lines, construction and infrastructure. A robust corridor, said Hans, is defined as one between one and two kilometres wide.

He showed me a photograph of a wide bridge straddling a motorway. The bridge itself is green and planted, like a long field fringed with shrubs. It connects two areas of woodland, otherwise cut through by the four traffic lanes and a rail line. Although a corridor can have a small camp-site beside it, it is designed for wildlife not for people and is not generally open to the public.

The Netherlands aims to have 27,000 hectares of eco-corridor by 2020. The government can deploy compulsory purchase powers to achieve up to 10 per cent of this target. It is a long-term game. We need to think in terms of the life span of an oak tree, said Hans, that's 300 years.

The network also links to natural areas across political frontiers. Connections with Germany and Belgium are vital for the dispersion and migration of species. Should it feel so inclined, a deer may one day wander from Rotterdam to Gdansk.

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