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 stacked units (around 5-20 in in thickness) have been identified by studying terraces and fining upward sequences in borehole records from the Roer valley graben. In both types of exposure, the bounding surfaces of these stacked sequences generally reflect long-term, basin-wide episodes of fluvial deposition and erosion. Dating and modelling support the interpretation that the sequences represent a fourth-order cyclicity in the hierarchy of environmental changes that affected fluviatile processes and caused river reactivation (at fifth-order level in Miall's classification). For this entire period of 10 million years, a strong correlation exists between the number of (buried) surfaces reflecting river reactivation and major climate cycles with a duration varying between approximately 400 to 50 thousand years. Measured in time-steps at million years scale (1-2 Ma), the dominant average duration shifts from 200 thousand years for the period from 10-2 Ma to 100 thousand years for the last 2 million years. Such climatically-controlled cyclicity is well-known from deep-sea cores. This correlation shows that climatic change is an important control on cyclicity in fluvial sequences as well. Moreover, it demonstrates that it is possible to meaningfully correlate the oceanic record with the continental fluvial record. Consequently, a continuous series of fifth-order fluvial sequences can be used to develop a high-resolution time frame, which will be of great value in the study of basin dynamics. Fluvial sequences, which reflect the two extremes of climatic cycles, are a welcome addition to palynological records, which are restricted to warm episodes. Zooming in on the components of fifth-order fluvial sequences has enabled us to demonstrate a fractal-type hierarchy within the coupling between sedimentary units and climate cycles. Fourth-, fifth- and sixth-order climate cycles equally reflect fifth-, fourth-, and probably third-o