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Each winter I wait for a phone call. As the mercury drops and English weather gets 'worse,' my hopes rise. Once in every three or four years a Dutch friend will call me, reporting on the first glazing of ice across the canals and lakes. By the time the ice on the Delft duck pond is a few centimetres thick, I’m on a plane, with my skates in hand.

Ice skating is not only the quintessential Dutch sport, it also underwrites the history, art and culture of the Netherlands. Perhaps most importantly a good freeze provides the Dutch (and their guests) with their one chance to discover a wilderness and an outdoor challenge within their own landscape. Slashed by rivers and canals, pocked with polders, meers and lakes and meshed in a web of interconnecting drainage ditches, the Netherlands are a long distance skater's dream. Thousands of kilometres of potential routes can carry the skater to the heart of a wild landscape, unsuspected and inaccessable, except when frozen.

Though on average February is the likeliest month for ice, warmer winters have meant less skating in past decades and there is little for the aspiring skater to do except be prepared and wait. Sometimes for years at a time. But at the first scabbing of ice across the canals, the Dutch, normally so earnest and responsible, abandon jobs and universities, uttering the traditional schoolchildren's demand of "We willen ijs vrij" - we want ice time.

In the Netherlands everybody skates. Speed teams, in tight lines, nose to nape of neck, legs pumping in a powerful unison, set the ice whining and vibrating like the rails under an approaching train. Children on double-bladed, tin skates push chairs ahead of themselves for balance. Unlikely looking people in town clothes shiver past. And veteran couples in sensible woollen jackets, arms entwined, sway along like ballroom dancers.

When I first started skating I prepared by walking the art galleries of Amsterdam. Breughel and Averkamp had painted skaters accurately enough to show the technique. I adopted the traditional skates that their bundled-up Medieval peasants used, and which were still available in second-hand shops; Friesan Doolopers - metal blades set into wooden platforms, which one straps onto ones walking boots. This allows the tyro skater the possibility of unstrapping them and walking away if things went badly.

My first venture onto the ice started on the banks of Delft's duck pond, where I cinched my skates on and listened to a Dutch friend's summarising of the Breughel technique. "Blades upright, push off with one skate, away from the other, at an angle of 45° or so. Make a good long glide. Bring the other foot forward and do the same again, to the other side." A small child swept by, following instructions to the letter. I stood up and did likewise. To much surprise and exultation it worked, and I spent an hour charging up and down the narrow strip of ice, blasting through the clouds of icy breath I blew ahead of me.

There was however more to learn. Efficient skaters lean forward at the waist, hands held behind the back, legs lazily scissoring back and forth to notch up 15-20 kilometres an hour, hour after hour. This classic pose was a little more difficult than the arm waving and leg jerking I had perfected. Stopping, though an essential skill for avoiding disaster in crowded areas, proved even more challenging. I struggled to angle the blades into a snow plough, and skid to a halt, without diving forward onto my nose in a painful shower of ice-crystals.

Having put a few kilometres of duck pond under my blades, and with the freeze biting deeper, it was time to get out into the country. Though purists would argue that the Netherland's best skating is in the most waterlogged and least populated province, Friesland; from my base in Delft I concentrated on the equal attractions of the rivers and lakes of Zuid Holland. The Netherland's small size and round the clock rail service makes it practical for the buitenlander to set up base in one of the larger towns and sally forth by rail and bus to reach the chosen skating grounds; returning after a days hard blading to traditional skaters' fare of pea-soup - snert - and boiled wurst. To return to Delft and its snug bars became the metaphysical goal of each of my day's skating.

For my first big outing I joined forces with Marten Klein to run the Amstel river, skating south from Amsterdam, via the Waver, to the lake at Botshal. We were following a route famous amongst English touring skaters of the last century. C G Tebbutt writing in the Badminton Library series of sporting guides in 1891 describes exactly this tour and also noted the egaletarian nature of Dutch life. He pointed out that in Holland you, "must put on your own skates even if you are a lady," conjuring up a vision of hip flasks, plus-fours, and deer-stalker hats. Little of the landscape had changed since his day. Serenaded by funeral bells and a mournful French horn, Marten and I strapped on our skates and cast off in Ouderkirk, past the dark hulks of barges frozen into the ice.

Within a few hundred yards my sang froid was shattered, literally, by a sudden explosion beneath my blades. A jagged crack shot through the ice and water gushed up in jets and spurts. I skidded back to the bank for some reassuring words on safety. The ice takes its strength from floating on the water, and cracks, crazing and sudden noises are all welcome proofs that the ice is safely under tension. "The danger comes," Marten explained, "when the water level drops below the ice, leaving it unsupported. When you hear nothing, but it bends beneath you, that's when you're in danger. That's also when you hope you can swim faster than you freeze."

We joined a stream of skaters swinging down the centre of the Amstel, and then to avoid thin ice under a bridge we kluned over the road to the river Waver. Klunen, the necessity to hobble, on ones skates, across roads, up banks and around locks, is the skater's nightmare. It is the removal of ones wings, and a return to a toiling everyday locomotion. On the more popular routes old carpets and rubber mats eased the ankle-snapping trudge from one ice sheet to the next.

For the full cross-country skating experience we kluned up above the fields to skate along a raised aqueduct, as if riding some surreal conveyor belt. C G Tebbutt described this experience of Dutch route finding; "We accepted the lead of a Dutchman and his boy taking a barrel of schiedam on a sledge, he gave us a cross-country gallop along ditches and drains, and through farmyards for hours." In less than hours, Marten and I debouched at Botshol, a scrub fringed lake mazed with reed beds. I soared off across the misty ice with the feeling not of walking on water but of flying silently above it. My passing further disgruntled gloomy herons slouching along the bank, and startled grebes and coots fussing around in ever contracting pools of water. And beneath my feet lay the bizarre sight of perch and chub frozen into ice so glassy that I could see the peaty brown bottom a metre or two down.

To get the most out of any freeze, however fleeting, skating clubs throughout the Netherlands are ready to rush into action. They lay mats at kluning points, mark off dangerous spots with Beano style wooden "Danger - Thin Ice" signs, fearlessly drive old cars converted into snow-ploughs across the lakes to clear tour routes, and then run those same tours. The most famous of the Netherland's tochten (tours) - is the Friesan Elfstendtocht - 'the eleven towns race' - run only in the coldest years when the ice is thick enough to support anything up to 17,000 competitors racing the 200 kms course.

But Zuid Holland has its own traditional tochten. The eccentric skater can set off from Gouda with a clay pipe tied to the back of their trousers to prove, if it remains intact, that narry a fall was taken en route to Rotterdam. Or bladesmen can strike of from Wateringen, bound for Vlaardingen to collect a bag of ijsmoppen, a particular and elusive breed of biscuits.

The Dutch take pleasure in the eccentric Dutchness of their tours. And with growing experience I joined a group to zig-zag around the Kagerplassen in a flurrying snowstorm to join up the 30 kilometres of windmills on the Molentocht. Stalls, slowly melting their way through the ice, provided koek en zopie - cakes and hot drinks. Dour men stamping their hay-filled clogs sat in small booths to stamp our tour cards, completion of which allowed one to claim a small medal at the end of the tour. Less than legal entrepreneurs had set up speak-easies in the rushes to sell welcome shots of 'beerenburger' and 'jaegermeister' to frozen ice-warriors.

For ten days of ice the country was transformed into a landscape from a Dutch master. Small villages, hayricks, gloomy barns, steaming dung-heaps and frost blasted trees poked from the snow in black detail. Russet cheeked farmers stumped past windmills pulling sledges. Moreover, there was an inspiring chasm between the knowledge that factories and towns lay only a little beyond sight, and the bleak feeling that the primeval cold and the gyring of the snow flakes had wiped away all civilization. And there was little to beat the pleasure of rediscovering that civilization; clumping into a bar, shedding layers of clothing in the heat, fingers, feet and ears numbed after hours spent gliding across pallid landscapes scribbled with reeds and distant spires.

A freeze rarely outlives the enthusiasm of the Dutch to skate, and even as the ice began to melt I was struggling, along with a small band of die-hards, intent on finishing a 70 kilometre tocht. A film of water rainbowed around our blades, and there were gaping holes in the ice, lapped by wavelets. Skating finishes like that; damply and in a feeling of anti-climax. When the ice has irrefutably gone the Dutch stolidly return to the upkeep of dams, dykes and the economy. And all the buitenlanders can do is grease their skate blades and leave a home phone number with some trustworthy local, with strict instructions to call - reverse charges - at the first sign of the next freeze.

The call to ice came last in January 1997, giving me two days of skating in Friesland and around Amsterdam. This year? Well, freezes tend to come in cycles. I've got my fingers crossed, my skates sharpened and KLM's reservations number ready. And of course the Dutch are famous for their gin - so mines's a splash of Genever and lots of ice.

Read more travel writing by Jasper Winn