The historical geography of the West Scheldt region, in particular the southeastern part of it bas been studied both by historians and geographers, but there is no consensus between them about the genesis of the landscape which bas been influenced by the presence of the river Scheldt. In this article we try to bring together the different points of view as well as their argumentation, to which new interpretation is added in order to come to an integration of the sources and -in our opinion -to provide an acceptable explanation of the historical geography of that region. There can be made a crude distinction between three regions in the area under consideration, which run more or less parallel to the West Scheldt river. First there is the most southerly area on both sides of the frontier between Belgium and the Netherlands. There is historical evidence that this region was largely covered with peat during the Middle Ages (fig. 1). De moeren , as this area was called in Dutch, were systematically drained from the 12th century on- wards and parceled out by important entrepreneurs from the cities as well as by religious institutions (such as the abbey of St. Baafs in Ghent), to dig out the valuable fuel and to make arable land after- wards. In this part of the region all the peat has been excavated. This was easy to do because of the thinness of the peat layer caused by a higher positition of the underlying pleistocene deposits. To this day this pleistocene sandy soil preserves its typicallinear settlement with an organisation of the land in small strips ( Marsch- hufenfluren ) (see figs. 2 and 3). Some Belgian geographers in- correctly considered this field pattern as typical of the Flemish sandy soils"(!), denying or neglecting the nearness of the West Scheldt in the formation of the landscape.The second region we studied is the area at present covered with a layer of clay. Contrary to what has sometimes been pointed out, this clay is of rather recent genesis. The Dunkerque transgressions had little influence on ...