Around 10 million years ago, the interplay of tectonics, climate and sea level changed markedly in the southern North Sea Basin. One of the results was the start of rapid progradation of the Rhine/Meuse delta. The sediments of this basin-filling complex have been preserved in a number of depocentres in an en-echelon arrangement which form the backbone of the North Sea Basin. These depocentres were located within the west-central part of the European intra-plate rift system. The southernmost part of this rift system, the Roer valley graben (part of the lower Rhine Embayment), was the first depocentre to be filled by sediments supplied by the rising hinterland in the south. The sediment- source area expanded gradually to include the Alpine collision front, which was first tapped by the river Rhine around three million years ago. Therefore, the sediments that filled the Roer valley graben provide information for unravelling the geological history of the north-west European plate.Using high-resolution, sequence-stratigraphic techniques, this thesis focuses on the stratigraphic, morphologic and tectonic aspects of the upper-delta and fluvial sediments, laid down by the Rhine/Maas (Meuse) fluvial system in the present-day Netherlands. The present study benefited greatly form the large database, compiled during the past decades by the Geological Survey of the Netherlands and the Winand Staring Centre-DLO Institute. Vital data sources were Zagwijn's pollen- based regional palaeo-climatic interpretations as a well as climatic data derived from deep-sea cores and ice cores. In addition, correlation of deep-sea geological records to astronomical parameters, proved of great value as it enabled conversion of the relative time scales based on palaeontological data to a linear one.In general, precise dating of fluvial deposits is difficult. As a consequence, interpretation largely depends on circumstantial evidence, such as the fractal-type hierarchical structure of the climatically controlled fluvial systems.A total of 57 ...