The market runs from 11am to 5pm that Sunday in the centre of Rolde, in the middle of the Roldermarkt festival week from Thursday 3 to Tuesday 8 September. The OVVR, which organises the Roldermarkt on behalf of the Boermarke Rolde-Nijlande-Eldersloo, the local farmers’ association, made the decision together with the Boermarke.
“We saw that it was getting harder and harder to get horse dealers to come to the Roldermarkt. That called for a fresh look,” says Margé Emmens, chair of the OVVR.
The association expects more people to have time on a Sunday to bring or buy horses, ponies and donkeys and to meet each other. The Roldermarkt breakfast and the showjumping competition, which were already on the Sunday, will go ahead as usual.
There will still be horses to see at the Roldermarkt itself on Tuesday 8 September. At 10.30am a horse spectacle begins, with carriage driving clinics and horses presented in hand and under saddle. At 1.30pm the singer Samantha Steenwijk, whom many people know from the Dutch television shows The Voice of Holland and Beste Zangers, gives a dressage show with Roos Kolkman on their Friesian stallions. Among other things they ride a pas de deux, which Steenwijk explains to the audience, and afterwards visitors can meet her.
The Roldermarkt began in 1785 as a livestock market where horses, cows, pigs, sheep and chickens changed hands. New rules and changes in farming made most of the livestock trade disappear, but the horse fair held its own and gained a goods market, an agricultural fair and other attractions. According to the OVVR, it is one of the three traditional horse fairs that Drenthe still has.