Dusking: The Dutch twilight ritual helping people slow down

Revived by a Dutch writer, the simple ritual of "dusking" – quietly watching the transition from day to night – is spreading beyond the Netherlands as a way to reconnect with the natural world.

Sitting cocooned under a thick blanket in a plant-filled orangery, I look through its large glass windows onto the 900-year-old stone walls of Helmsley Castle in North Yorkshire. I'm in a room full of people, yet a gentle stillness hangs in the air. Outside the sun is setting. Inside we are doing… absolutely nothing.

Or at least it looks that way. What we are actually experiencing – as a soft voice in the background reminds us – is the Dutch ritual of dusking. 

"Noticing twilight requires a persistent kind of attention. It's like a shy, rare animal. You have to take your time. Stay focused," the speaker instructs. "The day lingers like a drunken guest that doesn't want to leave the party. But slowly, slowly it is leaving. Just look up. There. See?"

The voice belongs to writer and night-sky enthusiast Marjolijn van Heemstra, who is working to revive this simple custom of pausing to watch the day fade into darkness. The idea came to her unexpectedly while leading a night walk in her home city of Amsterdam.

"An old lady told me that it reminded her of the dusking she used to do at a farm where she grew up," she explains.

"In Dutch we have a word for dusk – de schemer – but I had never heard it used as the verb. That triggered me to start asking around. I found that quite a lot of people had memories of their grandparents or parents doing it."

Van Heemstra started researching the custom and discovered dusking had once been common in the Netherlands, with mentions of it in newspapers during the first half of the 20th Century. Traditionally it was done by farming families to mark the end of the working day. They would often gather in the kitchen to look outside and observe the day turn to night, before lighting a candle and having dinner. By the 1960s and 70s, however, articles were already noting the ritual's disappearance as modern life accelerated. 

"I even found an article where someone wrote down how to do it, because [the writer] was worried that people had lost the practice," she says. "So I thought it would be nice to try and bring it back because it's a very accessible thing. You don't need anything, except for the world around you – and maybe a chair. You just sit and watch the world go dark."

While dusking can be practiced anywhere, Van Heemstra believes it works best as a shared experience. She now hosts dusking events across the Netherlands and recently brought the idea to the UK's market town of Helmsley as part of the North York Moors National Park Dark Skies Festival.

As I sit in the orangery, watching the sky flatten through a Pantone chart of greys, a calmness settles over me. The outlines of the castle walls begin to........

© BBC