A single dreadful episode, I now realise, unites the village’s signature 400-year-old, half-timbered house, the information boards about mediaeval life there, the haughty local chateau we walk past, and the stone abbey beyond that. That event is the burning at the stake in Grupont in 1618 of four sisters accused of witchcraft.

I can’t unsee it, and I have to find out more. It takes my wife Jessica and I a good half an hour nosing round Grupont before we start walking. I do plenty of reading later to get a fuller measure of what happened.

First, Grupont’s “Spanish House”. This picturesque if slightly spooky survivor got its name because it was the seat of a court set up when much of today’s Low Countries were ruled from Hapsburg Spain. It was here that four sisters were brought for trial in 1618 after they were denounced in their village of Neuvillers, on the outskirts of Libramont-Chevigny, the end-point of my next day on the trail, stage #15.

This fear of witchcraft – “wild rumours” as the information boards have it – is the flipside of the religiosity that I have witnessed on every kilometre of my 360 km hike, including wayside crosses, chapels of all kinds, churches in every hamlet, religious boarding schools, monasteries and abbeys.

Mediaeval life was traumatic in ways I can barely imagine. Wars festered and unruly soldiers threatened. A bout of the plague could wipe out half the population of a village. Punishments matched the gothic spirit of the times: a traitor would be buried alive, and a vintner found adulterating his wine would be burned to death in one of his vats.

Religious belief was total in a real, all-powerful God. But not everyone followed the same practices and doctrines, and long-dominant catholicism was being challenged by protestant ideas. Mystics, monks and ascetics could amass great followings. And veering off the path – as a woman living alone, missing mass in church, an argument with neighbours, owning an enviable property, being a newcomer – could lead to a denunciation as a witch or sorcerer in direct league with the devil.

The sin of witchcraft was no clear thing. Accusations of sorcery, devil worship, magical potion-making and early protestant thinking were inextricably mixed. The role of the Roman Catholic church and the state is murky, too. For some academics, mediaeval crazes for witch-hunting were encouraged by fanatical bishops and decrees from Hapsburg Spain trying to buttress catholic doctrine. For other experts, witch fever was the result of crushing wars, local ignorance and economic distress, and the more worldly church leadership and distant secular rulers were just trying to get a grip on the situation.

Whatever the cause, Leuven University professor Dries Vanysacker reports that about 1,200 witches were executed in the Southern Netherlands between 1450–1685, more than 80% of them women. The districts of Namur and Luxembourg, through which I am walking, were among the most violent, accounting for nearly half the deaths. The debate was not a rational one. Denying the existence of witches was to deny the existence of the Devil, and therefore a direct contradiction of Catholic doctrine. Nearly illiterate local priests worsened the problem, Vanysacker says:

“The rites and sacraments of the Church were as incomprehensible and supernatural as the arts of a magician or fortune-teller for both the priest and his parishioners. Moreover, the local clergy acted in a way that fuelled popular belief. Parish priests, nuns and monks disenchanted [exorcised] animals and humans, pointed out witches, testified during trials and occasionally ended up at the stake themselves.”

All this led to the cruel fate of the four Jamin sisters. A higher court in the chief regional city of Liège (Leuk in Dutch) confirmed their condemnation by the Spanish House magistrates in Grupont. The document is preserved in the state archive in Arlon, a Luxembourg border town that I reach at the end of Stage #18 of the trail. The high court says it:

“condemns the said Jeanne to be led to the place of execution, and there bound to a stake, strangled and burned, both in death … as an example to others. Furthermore, on the way to the place of execution, you shall examine her more fully concerning her sorceries and accomplices, and if she can confess nothing further, you shall have her subjected to torture; and if she persists in her accusations until death, you shall condemn to cold and hot torture her sisters Alix, [Marie], and Jehenne, sisters of the said Jeanne …”

As Jessica and I climb out of Grupont, our path passes where the four sisters were burned in March, 1618. The place bears the incongruous name of ‘Bel-Air’. It’s March now too, and I wonder if the sisters’ last sight were the same snow drops and daffodils now emerging from the verge of the track. Further on come modern commercial stands of pine. The other trees have not started putting their summer leaves on. The path often turns into mud and the sun shines brightly off the pale green moss that wraps whole tree trunks.

We are soon walking on the banks of the fast-running Lomme river, which is close by us for the whole day. We are also following in the footsteps of the Jamin sisters’ terrible story. At about the five kilometre point we round a bend in the Lomme that passes under the château de Mirwart.

Mirwart’s thousand-year-old fortress is where the Jamin sisters were tortured before being killed. (This story is not mentioned on the hotel website). The cold and hot torture, for instance, involved being forced to drink several litres of cold water followed by several litres of scalding water. Marie, and likely her sisters, also faced the agony of being forcibly stretched on Mirwart’s rack. In fact, a “voluntary” confession within 24 hours of torture was obligatory for the death sentence to be carried out, Leuven’s Vanysacker says. An information board in Grupont translates one of the historical accounts thus:

“Because she confessed nothing, they were forced to torture her. They abused her on the machine so badly that she could no longer get off it or walk. Her niece Magdalene Pidard took pity and went to get her, to take her on her back to her house and to lay her on her bed, where she was so destroyed and dislocated that she could no longer move, nor walk, nor leave her bed. She was miserable and distressed due to the long imprisonment and cold, her feet were frozen and almost completely rotted; the nails were falling off the ends of her hands and feet; she had extraordinary swellings on the lower parts of her arms, which she couldn’t lift to her head. She was not just afflicted in every part of her body, but she also found herself stripped of all her things, furniture and real estate, which those from the so-called justice sold to pay for the time spent on their so-called jobs.”

The chronicles of those times – again relayed by the boards in Grupont – show how specious charges against these terrified women were:

“The suspicions that make up the charges against her include fixing her gaze at the ground during her examination, not looking at the judge, despite being admonished, the evil suspicions about her mother, the common reputation that she is a sorceress, her contradictory statements, her incomplete rosary that has no cross, the fact that she does not know her prayers, and the fact there is not a tear in her eye.”

There is a footpath to scramble up to get closer to the château de Mirwart from our trail route, but we stay down by the river. Just after passing the old castle’s lake and cave-like ice-store, there’s a view from a bridge over the railway through the bare branches of the trees of its wide stone façade and towers.

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The fashion for hunting “real” witches died out a half-century after the killings of the Jamin sisters, leaving future societies to invent other fevered witch-hunts for non-conformists, communists, Islamists, and others. I find it hard to imagine what I would do if I was suddenly caught in the maw of some such craze, for being a foreigner or a misfit, and having no way of proving that I wasn’t. I hope I never find out. The worst official denunciation against me I can remember – and one to which I had no response either – was when the Iranian government telexed to expel me from Tehran on the grounds that, among other misdeeds, I saw “the glass half empty when in fact it is half full.”

Our path is now weaving its way under some fine examples of 19th century Belgian railway bridges over our path and the Lomme. The rate of the river’s descent is steep enough for waterfall-like rapids, several old mills and an occasional small modern hydroelectric station.

Soon we arrive at our day’s destination, the railway station of Poix-St Hubert, with its nearby hotels and summer restaurants. It serves the nearby town of St Hubert, seven kilometres away. It was from here that Nicolas de Fanson, early in his 41-year tenure as the 46th abbot of St Hubert’s ancient monastery, oversaw the 1618 witch hunt against the Jamin sisters. Today he is honoured with a special casket showing off his skull and bones. A note nearby only praises him as a reformer of the abbey, as a founder of schools for girls and as one “animated by an ardent zeal for God.”

You can download the GPX file for the Grupont to Poix-St Hubert route for free here and or by navigating along this hiking route on my Brux-to-Lux Trail collection on Komoot, the hiking app.

A overview video of the route is available here. More photos of each stage can be found on my Facebook page.

My 26 April 2026 piece in the Brussels Times about the Brux-to-Lux Trail is here.

If you’ve enjoyed a walk or a piece of writing, you’re very welcome to make a one-off contribution toward trains, maps, and time on the road.

Help me blaze new trails

If you’d like to offer closer support, you can also take out a paid subscription. Alongside the free material, subscribers can:

• submit specific questions about the route or the project

• receive occasional behind-the-scenes posts

Just fill in your email below for all the options:

Brussels, like many inland cities of northwestern Europe’s Low Countries, actually owes its early growth to the way it sits on a river where the hills start. The town grew up at the limit of where pre-modern sea-going ships could reach inland. The only heights to admire while walking north-west of the city along flat paths towards the sea are those of the trees and the church steeples. Information boards are not just about birds and bushes but Viking incursions.

My height above sea-level has therefore been steadily rising as I’ve been heading southeast. My home near Brussels-North is at 36 metres above sea level, and here at the beginning of the 13th day-stage of the walk I’m at 212 metres.

I don’t actually know beforehand that today is the day I am going to top the highest peak of my Brux-to-Lux Trail. My train is late and I miss the bus to the starting point I have been planning to use. I switch to a back-up route. When I leave the station at Rochefort-Jemelle, instead of the rivers to the south-west, I head up the hills to the south-east. My goal for the day is the same, though, the town of Grupont on the Lomme river to the south.

Whoever built the provincial road away from the station seems not to have imagined that anyone would leave it on foot. Speeding motor traffic rules a road with no side pavement, even in this touristic area of Belgium. My dog Einstein and I survive two or three near-death encounters in the first few hundred metres. It’s a great relief as the moment comes that we’ve learned to look forward to. A gap opens up at the side of the road and we plunge into a world of woods, paths and a hundred shades of green.

The trees seem to be taller again, perhaps because I am moving from the Famenne region with its lower, bushier vegetation into the Ardennes proper. Beeches are back, as well as big plantations of firs. As I climb, gaps in the tree line give me fine views back towards Rochefort. It’s mid-August, and there are fat blackberries on the brambles by many of the paths. I become adept at spotting, picking and and popping them into my mouth with barely a break in my stride.

Over the crest of the first hill I join a peaceful country lane and pass a herd of cows in the shade of a great oak. In the valley, I am soon walking through the village of Ambly.

As often, I find satisfaction in the pattern of my arrival and departure from rural settlements in Belgium. First my path turns into a tractor track, then perhaps gets a gravel surface. Usually at the first house, the road hardens to tarmac. Here at Ambly, I proceed down a main street, where I see one or two people getting into a car, then walk past neat holiday houses, farms, a closed raw milk cheese shop and a brewery on its summer break. Then the road turns into a single-track lane as I climb out of the valley. I pass tractors and briefly take an unpaved track. Soon I’m back on a one-person-wide path picking blackberries again.

The path goes over a forested hill, turns into a lane through meadows with more fine herds of cows and then becomes a track for a long, slow climb. At the top, I’m back on a path as I pass what a sign on a wooden post tells me is La Copette des Tiers, 370 metres above sea level. I later realise it’s the highest point I’ll reach on my own 360 km trek.

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It’s a pretty, mild, curved hilltop. It is certainly not a peak that would be noticed by someone from the long queue of climbers that every year social media platforms think I want to watch shuffling up Mount Everest. But I have the Copette des Tiers completely to Einstein and myself, and I am 50-60 metres higher than anywhere in the Netherlands or southeast England. (The highest points in Belgium and Luxembourg are double this, near where their countries’ borders meet Germany to the east.) Fine views reach out over the lower hills to the south and west. I must also be able to see into France, which at this point is 30 km away.

This modest peak makes me conscious how strange it is that I can take such pleasure from the random act of walking from Brussels to Luxembourg. It helps that the countryside happens to be outstanding along my route. But this kind of project also satisfies some deeper human need. Several friends and people I randomly meet seem to enjoy some kind of cumulative mission, be that pilgrimages, sporting achievements or, like me, a private challenge to walk, cycle or ride from A to B.

In my old home of Turkey, my friend Martin swam around quite a section of the Mediterranean coast, adding a few more kilometers each day out with a small floating barrel in tow to keep his clothes, car keys and papers dry. Caroline rode a horse to recreate a sense of the journeys of the famous Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi. Tim leathers up for trans-continental safaris on a huge motorbike that seems to roar through several hundred of kilometres a day. Kate Clow, a genius at finding ancient footpaths and military roads, is still piecing together the paths that make up the Lycian Way. It’s now one of Europe’s best long-distance trails and stretches more than 500 km long round the mountains of the Tekke peninsula.

Then there’s Pierre, a bicyclist who staggered into a Turkish wayside restaurant where I was having lunch. I’d noticed him at the bottom of the long mountain road I’d just driven up, and I congratulated him on his stamina. I also offered him a lift onwards. As we loaded his 60 kilos of bike and saddlebags onto the roof of my ancient Land Rover, I learned that he had simply left his home town of Blois in France to see where he could get to. In eight months, he’d reached high mountains in the Caucasus, decided that the deserts of Central Asia were too flat to bother with and was now pedaling his way home. He painted a lot and posted on his progress under a charming, self-explanatory moniker: Pierre Qui Roule (Pierre on Wheels, a clever pun on Rolling Stone).

Maybe I’m the same, just Hugh Who Walks, wherever the paths may lead. I pick my way on down a stream-gouged trail into Masbourg, a stone-built village of well-kept houses with arched gates, prosperous architectural details and no people about. Few cars drive along the roads and lanes, but on my way out, always trying to flee tarmac in favour of a forest path, I misread the map and end up facing a locked gate. I turn back. A kilometre later I’m back in the woods.

The path runs along the bottom of the Lomme river valley. At times, we bump against the Luxembourg railway line before heading back into the trees. It’s at about this point that I notice that Einstein no longer has the red collar he has worn for most of his 11 years. It came from Istanbul, where we used to live. Jessica bought it in a small underground passage by the Galata bridge. The loss will be painful to report. I start going over in my mind all the places along the route it might have fallen.

We reach my destination for the day, Grupont. I wish I had more company to join me for a meal at an open air summer cafe called Olé!, overlooking a fine, large half-timbered house that looks its age, more than 400 years old. And more time, since there are works on the railway and I mustn’t be late for the replacement bus.

The station is strangely hard to find in a hamlet of 200 souls. I go through a tunnel to the wrong side of the tracks. Einstein and I end up scrambling and running a few hundred metres to get back round. A bus eventually arrives. I jump on with relief. Luckily, I also check where it is going before we get onto a road. It’s headed in the wrong direction. The driver lets me back out. I return to the station forecourt and a few more minutes later I am whisked back to Rochefort.

There’s ten minutes to go before the train back to Brussels. The most likely place that Einstein’s collar might be, I reckon, is half a kilometre into the walk, where I tied the lead and collar around my waist as I tried to manhandle some branches off the path. I challenge myself, knot the remains of the lead round Einstein’s neck and off we go. At a run.

First, the few hundred metres of dangerous road. Then the stiff upward path. The 16 km that I’ve walked so far are making themselves known in my legs. Where was that branch? I should really turn back, I tell myself, missing the train would be annoying. But perhaps not so much of a disaster as having to explain my oversight to Jessica. Onwards and upwards. Ah, here’s the branch. I start looking for the collar. The path is wide, full of leaves and twigs, and there’s no collar to be seen. I’m slightly red/green colourblind so time-worn reds do not stand out. I focus on what the shape of the woven nylon must be.

And then, yes! There’s the collar! So lucky. Einstein seems happy to see it too. Back on his neck it goes. Maybe that’s what walking is to me too: a kind of collar that keeps me feeling safe and on track. We spring back downhill, and reach the train just as it is pulling in.

You can download the GPX file for the Rochefort-Jemelle to Grupont route for free here and or by navigating along this hiking route on my Brux-to-Lux Trail collection on Komoot, the hiking app.

A overview video of the route is available here. More photos of each stage can be found on my Facebook page.

My 26 April 2026 piece in the Brussels Times about the Brux-to-Lux Trail is here.

If you’ve enjoyed a walk or a piece of writing, you’re very welcome to make a one-off contribution toward trains, maps, and time on the road.

Help me blaze new trails

If you’d like to offer closer support, you can also take out a paid subscription. Alongside the free material, subscribers can:

• submit specific questions about the route or the project

• receive occasional behind-the-scenes posts

Just fill in your email below for all the options:

This 12th day-stage of my Brux-to-Lux Trail underscores how my enjoyment of the route needs diligent preparation. Tempted by a converted former railway line, I overlook that this route means I will spend 90% of the day on roads and paved surfaces. Previous stages could be more than 90% on mostly natural paths. In short, the hike doesn’t feel right the first time. So I go back and do it again, adding in more woods and earthen tracks.

Our first time round starts splendidly enough. My wife Jessica & I have broken my rule about getting back to Brussels after each day’s walk and are staying in a fine small bed & breakfast (Les2Sources) in the village of Villers-sur-Lesse. (If you prefer to get home, please see the bottom of stage #11 for my suggestions on how to do the three days’ walking described here in two days). Our host Alain serves us breakfast with eggs, cheese, dried meat, yoghurt, honey, jams, juice, coffee and other side-dishes I’ve forgotten. Like us, he loves a diet of diversity.

“Here in the Famenne, we have a bit of everything,” he said, referring to his small, little-known region of Belgium and its old farms, crumbly slate paths, boggy hollows, and woods overflowing with undergrowth. “The trouble with the Ardennes is that it’s all just rivers and forests.”

Alain’s breakfast spread and pep-talk put a spring in our step as we head out. For the first time on the Brux-to-Lux Trail, though, I am walking on a road with some traffic, for the whole first five kilometres, in fact. Never mind that we could still see the château royal de Ciergnon receding into the distance over the fields, or that we were walking alongside the Lesse, or that the first village we pass through, Lessive, is filled with attractive brick- and stone-built barns and houses. Tarmac is tarmac and we have to keep our ears cocked for the occasional car.

In the village of Éprave, one of the great traditions of Belgian life crosses our path, a group of young people heading out to spend some days in the country. Their backpacks are three times the size of mine, and all have a full array of camping equipment strapped onto the sides. This includes a dangling mess tin for eating, like the half-gourd of a wandering dervish. Some youths also hang their boots on their packs and trip happily along in their campsite flipflops.

Éprave’s village houses are mostly in stalwart 19th century grey stone, often with a big gate in the wall to accommodate a haywain. In the north of the village, there’s another chapel and again I meet St Roch, the patron saint of pet dogs and keeping plagues at bay. Building the sanctuary was a promise kept to the saint by the villagers after a cholera epidemic in 1855.

The first time I walk the route between Éprave and Rochefort, we continue north to take the RAVeL 150B trail, a converted railway line. It’s fine in some ways, but monotony, tarmac and other wheeled traffic make this section of the old railway uninspiring. So I return another day to find a better route through the hills to the southwest of Rochefort, which is what I’ll now describe.

The second time, I head south out of Éprave, past the Brasserie de la Lesse, where there is a functioning café if you have a thirst. I can’t resist putting six bottles of their TOP Lesse beer in my backpack. After a short section on by-roads, the trail leads to one of the wonders of the Famenne, the “emergence” of a tributary to the Lomme river from a slate hill outcrop (the river is also spelled as L’Homme). There’s a small clearing on top of the hillock to admire the view. Back down at the river, explore carefully and you will find the pool where the water bubbles up from 90 metres underground.

After the emergence of the Lomme, I keep going round a wide field that is the start of a four kilometre climb on good earthen paths. At the top, just south of Rochefort, there’s a great lookout point and picnic spot. A route through woodland then winds down into the town. It joins a road that passes picturesque houses and mansions down into the centre.

For the last three kilometres from Rochefort through the forest to the mainline railway station of Rochefort-Jemelle, the converted railway line is now the best option. For a while it runs romantically above the Lomme river. Then a damp, moss-covered cutting into one side of the hill exposes outcrops of nearly 400 million-year-old Devonian rock, decked in an exquisite palette of greens and ancient-looking ferns.

The old railway line ends with an urbexing-like experience near Rochefort-Jemelle station. We pass by the ruin of a magnificent century-old factory or depot, whose floor is now strangely home to what looks like giant sacks overflowing with yellow tennis balls.

We’re early for the train, so we head into Jemelle to find refreshments for the ride home. The once-proud houses now look poor and run down in what was once an outpost of Belgium’s industrial heartland. High above us is the huge processing plant of the Lhoist quicklime quarry. Apparently it is now winding down its activities after losing a fight with the nearby Rochefort Abbey over whether or not it can mine into the limestone that the monks need for the water to make their strong monastic brews.

Industry or nature? Mammon or godly folk? Quicklime or beer? We mull over these Belgian dilemmas on the comfortable train ride home. Right now, though, the thought of a small band of monks winning such an epic conflict adds to my enjoyment of a red-capped bottle of Rochefort No. 6, the oldest recipe still in production at the 400-year-old brewery.

You can download the GPX file for the Villers-sur-Lesse to Rochefort-Jemelle route for free here and or by navigating along this hiking route on my Brux-to-Lux Trail collection on Komoot, the hiking app.

A overview video of the route is available here. More photos of each stage can be found on my Facebook page.

My 26 April 2026 piece in the Brussels Times about the Brux-to-Lux Trail is here.

If you’ve enjoyed a walk or a piece of writing, you’re very welcome to make a one-off contribution toward trains, maps, and time on the road.

Help me blaze new trails

If you’d like to offer closer support, you can also take out a paid subscription. Alongside the free material, subscribers can:

• submit specific questions about the route or the project

• receive occasional behind-the-scenes posts

Just fill in your email below for all the options:

At about the half-way point of the Brux-to-Lux Trail, on the eleventh day of my walk, I cross some inner Belgian borders.

The trail edges into the Famenne, a depression between the plateau south of Brussels and the southeastern Ardennes. I transition from open-floored forests to scrubbier woodlands. I also take my leave of the railway south to the French border and head east to find the line to Luxembourg.

This is the second day of a three-day section along the river Lesse and I’m still in deep countryside. I’ve managed to plan for 87% of the day’s 19.4 km walk to be on paths. The stage also ends not at a railway station, but with a welcome night in a small hotel. If you prefer to find public transport home to Brussels or elsewhere, please see the bottom of this post for how this section can be compressed to two days!

My wife Jessica and I pick up the trail at the railway station of Gendron-Celles. I’m planning not to follow the pleasant-looking grand randonnée path GR 126 along the Lesse. To save four kilometres and to serve my principle of walking through as varied a landscape as possible, we labour up a hill that my Komoot hiking app defines as ‘alpine’, not an adjective much applied to low-lying Belgium. The route does give us a look at the pretty, stone-built Wallonian village of Gendron, root-knotted paths between forests and fields, and a small herd of plausibly Swiss-looking cows. But the climb is steep and dense patches of woods allow little more than the path to be seen. If doing the stage again, I might stick to the Lesse for the whole day.

On the edge of one highland pasture, we pass a Flemish couple talking urgently into their phones in French. They’ve come up to get a cellphone connection to arrange an ambulance for a lady who has tripped and twisted her ankle farther on. We wait with them until they find help. On the steep, difficult path down the other side we meet the injured person, one of a party of three middle-aged Walloons with three well-groomed small dogs. All are resigned to their fate, chatty and cheerful.

Their faith that the emergency services will reach them soon enough says a lot about the comforts of living in Belgium. We are a few kilometres from the nearest road. Indeed, at the bottom of the slope, it is so quiet I am able to record the sound of the charmingly named Ywoigne stream for a whole two minutes with no noise at all from the anthropocene.

I’m still thinking too of the message from the belt on the Flemish lady’s waistpack, “MILES ARE MY MEDITATION”. Something about the slogan doesn’t resonate with me. I look it up afterwards. It turns out to be a cyclists’ mantra, finding relief from stress in the pedal-pushing conquest of miles and miles of road. Walking does clear my head too. But it’s not from the distance covered, and neither do I ever listen to anything on headphones. I love the the novelty of new paths, unexpected sights and diversions, enjoying good company or on my own, and being able to stop at any moment and just absorb nature and whatever else is around me.

After the Ywoigne stream brings us back to the Lesse river, indeed, I’m so clear-headed that I miss spotting something exotic in the stonework as I walk under a railway bridge. There for all to explore – if one has one’s eyes open and goes up a bit – is a relic from the reign of Belgium’s King Leopold II: the Halte Royale d’Ardenne, or Ardenne Royal Stop along the railway. It’s an ingenious circular structure that allows a carriage to gain height and reach Leopold II’s Château Royal d’Ardenne, a kilometre away on the top of the hill. This building replaced his father’s hunting lodge in the 1870s-90s, eventually as a luxury hotel with Belgium’s first golf course. The original palatial building burned down in 1968, but a royal-branded golf club keeps going from its clubhouse in a large folly, Leopold’s Tower.

At the entrance of the village of Houyet we come across a buvette by the path that serves cheese, beer and hand-made craft objects. We’ve already eaten sandwiches by the Lesse, so we feel we can’t stop. I’m still surprised by all these touristic facilities, rare along my Brussels to Luxembourg route, and commend them to any who may follow.

As we climb uphill again, I notice a change happening underfoot. More and more sections of path are pure bedrock, or at least what counts as rock in the Famenne. This small geological region – squeezed from north and south by the wide Condroz and Ardennes bands of limestone – is mainly underlaid by shales and slates. Thin wafers of rock crackle, crunch and crumble under our boots. The ease with which it disintegrates is why the Famenne is mostly a depression, and home to some of Belgium’s most intriguing underground rivers and cave systems.

The plant life is different too. Gone are the tall beech trees of the plateau south of Brussels, whose thick leaf cover banishes most competitors from the forest floor. Here the thinner, boggier soils favour scrappier, more open oak trees and birches, allowing the undergrowth to run riot. On wooded parts of the route, the path can sometimes seem like a tunnel.

Down the other side of the hill, we come to a long curve in the hills that the path follows 50 metres above the Lesse. This leads us to the village of Herock, with old, thick-walled farms and a good-looking hotel (minimum stay two nights, horses supplied). There’s no dodging a 200-metre stretch of real road and cars before we’re back on a path along the river again. We find a place to scramble into the water. The Lesse is so shallow here that lying in the water barely counts as a swim, but we managed anyway.

The path then brings us to the Ravel Line 150 B, 22 km of an old railway line paved for walking, cycling and riding horses between Houyet and Rochefort-Jemelle. We stay with it for 2.5 km today. It’s easy going and we see few other users. It also takes us under the main E411 highway from Brussels to Luxembourg. The trucks are rumbling down at right angles to us at this point of the trail, which feels odd, because we are ultimately heading in the same direction. In fact, my determination to stay in countryside and get back home at night by train makes the Brux-to-Lux Trail double the length of the motorway journey between the same points. Jessica gives the traffic a quixotic wave.

The drivers probably don’t see Jessica’s greeting, nor another fairy-tale castle on the other side of the highway. This time it is the château royal de Ciergnon, favoured by today’s Belgian royal family for their summers in the country. Smaller and sweeter than the previous Stage #10’s Château de Walzin, it strikes a remarkably pretty pose above the Lesse. Views of it accompany us for another kilometre until we reach the end of our day-stage at Villers-sur-Lesse.

We dine excellently under a three-decade-old wisteria in the lovely garden of the Auberge du Bief de la Lesse. We sleep comfortably at a cyclists’ bed and breakfast called Les2Sources, where the owner stocks his courtesy fridge from the nearby Brasserie de la Lesse. A stirring nightcap of the brewery’s strong blond beer, L’Esprit Triple, helps my post-trail meditations float on downstream.

Dinant to Rochefort in two days

It was at this mid-way point in the walk, done through 2025, that I decided that the rest of my route would shadow the railway line to Luxembourg from Rochefort-Jemelle station. To reach Rochefort is quite a long way east from Dinant and lacks many good public transport options. So I broke my rule that every day-stage should be planned so I could get back to Brussels for the night. I took three stages (#10, #11 and #12 in this account) to reach Rochefort, including a night in a bed & breakfast in Villers-sur-Lesse after this Stage #11.

If you don’t want to spend the night on the road, you can get to Rochefort in two days’ walking, not three. The easiest way to do this would be to continue after the end of this Stage #10 for another 5 km along Stage #11, making for an 18.6 km walk, and return home from the railway station at Houyet. (The route would be about 23 km if you go along the Lesse rather than taking the ‘alpine’ route via Gendron). This leaves about 30 km to walk from Houyet over to Rochefort-Jemelle on the Brux-to-Lux Trail route.

The second day’s distance can be shortened to 22 km if you stick entirely to the converted Ravel railway line from Houyet. This is straightforward and free of motor traffic, but I found the section that we walked on the Ravel rather straight, dull, paved and exposed to bicyclists and electric scooter users.

You can download the GPX file for the Gendron-Celles to Villers-sur-Lesse route for free here and or by navigating along this hiking route on my Brux-to-Lux Trail collection on Komoot, the hiking app.

A overview video of the route is available here. More photos of each stage can be found on my Facebook page.

My 26 April 2026 piece in the Brussels Times about the Brux-to-Lux Trail is here.

If you’ve enjoyed a walk or a piece of writing, you’re very welcome to make a one-off contribution toward trains, maps, and time on the road.

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From Dinant railway station, my wife Jessica, our dog Einstein and I pass over the bridge honours both French statesman Charles de Gaulle’s war wound here in 1914 and also the saxophone, with 28 floridly-painted statues of the instrument invented by Dinant-born Adolphe Sax. We turn south down the Meuse riverside path, past pleasure boats with names like Bon Viveur, and under steep cliffs to the village of Anseremme.

On the left a Belgian flag flies from a 40 metre-high crag. The rock emerges like a needle from a sheer cliff face carved 300 million years by the flow of the Meuse, one of the world’s oldest rivers. Legend talks of the ‘Rocher Bayard’ being split by an eponymous steed leaping over the river to save a band of four brothers from the armies of Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor around 800 AD; others say it is the result of blasting by French King Louis XIV’s military engineers, blowing up the cliff three hundred years ago to widen a road for his troops.

Belgium’s King Albert I, a skilled alpinist, was (officially) one of the first to scale the Rocher Bayard in 1933. A year later, climbing alone on one of the region’s hundreds of climbing routes on the other side of Namur, he fell to his death. Aged just 58, Belgium lost a humane-sounding king whom the Los Angeles Herald in 1909 called “one of the most democratic royalists in Europe”. Indeed, after coming to the throne in 1908, Albert I pushed through universal male suffrage and tried to reform his uncle and predecessor Leopold II’s abusive regime in the Belgian Congo.

Traffic passes on the road next to the river path, but it’s a tolerable distance away. Cars are only in sight for 2 km of the day’s 13.6 km route, on which 77% of the distance is on paths. (I’ve put a note at the end about alternative routes that allow you to do Stages #10, #11 and #12 in just two days’ walking).

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Anseremme, where the River Lesse flows into the Meuse, is tourist country and known to Belgian schoolchildren as the end of an idyllic day spent kayaking. The bathrooms of the terminus where they land are also a good chance to top up on water before the main part of the walk, even take a shower, should you want one. Then a narrow path leads walkers along the south bank of the Lesse, initially with the railway line close by.

The Lesse is not just for walkers, climbers and kayakers. The narrowness of the path does not deter a Dutch group who pass us on the offspring of an unholy union between an electric street scooter and a mountain bike. One rider is clearly struggling to get over a roots-broken section of the path. I watch from where I’ve been forced to wait in the long grass to one side. “Are you really enjoying that?” I ask the rider. “That’s what they told us we would do,” she enigmatically replied.

We make our way down to a pleasant stone beach by the river to sit and lunch on some sandwiches. Belgium’s youth is bumping downstream in their blue, yellow and red plastic kayaks. The river is low and they keep getting stuck, jumping out, pushing, splashing, laughing and shouting. I enjoy watching the happy procession of people pass by – I later learn that 1,500 kayaks go downriver each day in summer – with barely a smartphone in sight.

The next group of two-wheeled visitors I meet on our path are a loud, hard-charging Dutch convoy of off-road bikers. In their tight lycra bubble, they are immune to paltry pedestrians. It reminds me of the terrors of competing for rights of way with bicyclists – more serene, but just as entitled – on the confusing urban intersections of Holland. Jessica has to restrain me from expressing some outrage at what I perceive as an attack on my own path-owning bubble.

I can’t stay upset for long, because we’ve arrived before the Château de Walzin. I’d seen a castle marked on the map, but didn’t know what it looked like. I’m astonished to be gazing at Wallonia’s answer to the fairy-tale castle of Neuschwanstein in Bavaria, Germany, proudly standing on a high cliff over the Lesse. The kayakers also pause here for their picnics. Our path offers many arresting views of the scene from under the trees and a long meadow path by the river.

The railway, never far away today, has a bridge that we take over the Lesse to a footpath round another meander in the national reserve of Furfooz, another great Belgian name. We are even able to stop to take a dip in the water. It’s cold and refreshing, even if shallow and shared with cheerful oncoming kayakers.

An unexpected boon of this rare part of the Brux-to-Lux Trail where it coincides with the presence of holiday-makers is that we stumble on a little cafe on the bank of the river. La Flobette offers “light, artisanal, wild meals”, including locally picked plants. It also introduces me to beers from the Lesse Brewery further upstream. This cooperative’s pils got my day’s branding prize: a couple bathing chest-deep in the river under the name TOP Lesse.

Not far to go now to the station at Gendrons-Celles, just under a handsome stone bridge. The late afternoon sun is painting the valley in a thousand colours of leafy green. Luckily there is plenty of time before our train arrives to enjoy it all, sit by another riverside cafe, and restore ourselves with some excellent Belgian frites.

Dinant to Rochefort in two days

It was around this stage of the walk (done through 2025) that I decided that the last part of my route would shadow the railway line to Luxembourg from Rochefort-Jemelle station, which I reach at the end of Stage #12. To reach Rochefort is quite a long way east without many good public transport options. So I broke my rule that every day-stage should be planned so I could get back to Brussels for the night, took three stages to reach Rochefort, including a night in a bed & breakfast in Villers-sur-Lesse after Stage #11.

If you don’t want to spend the night on the road, you can get to Rochefort in two days’ walking, not three. The easiest way to do this would be to continue after the end of this Stage #10 for another 5 km along Stage #11, making for an 18.6 km walk, and return home from the railway station at Houyet. This leaves about 30 km to walk from Houyet over to Rochefort-Jemelle on the Brux-to-Lux Trail route.

The distance can be shortened to 22 km if you stick to the converted Ravel railway line from Houyet. This is straightforward and free of motor traffic, but I found the section that we walked on the Ravel rather too straight, dull, paved and exposed to bicyclists and electric scooter users.

You can download the GPX file for the Dinant-Gendron-Celles route for free here and or by navigating along this hiking route on my Brux-to-Lux Trail collection on Komoot, the hiking app.

A overview video of the route is available here. More photos of each stage can be found on my Facebook page.

My 26 April 2026 piece in the Brussels Times about the Brux-to-Lux Trail is here.

If you’ve enjoyed a walk or a piece of writing, you’re very welcome to make a one-off contribution toward trains, maps, and time on the road.

Help me blaze new trails

If you’d like to offer closer support, you can also take out a paid subscription. Alongside the free material, subscribers can:

• submit specific questions about the route or the project

• receive occasional behind-the-scenes posts

Just fill in your email below for all the options:

Three large hills to hike over give unusually fine views over the country. I rejoice in an entirely car-free 19th century Belgian street, and encounter forgotten moments in the lives of Charles de Gaulle, Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler. I touch on the river Meuse (Maas in Dutch) running deep in the valley to my west, and also walk through wide wheat-fields on the shoulders of land above. And for the first and fortunately last time on my Brux-to-Lux Trail, orienteering errors leave me struggling for direction in nettles, brambles and private property.

As I start, I prop my walking stick against a wooden notice board outside Godinne Station to see what I can learn from the map of local walks. As usual, I find it hard to identify with the rather confusing and overlapping routes on offer, despite eye-catching names like ‘Trappers’ Way’ and ‘The Timid and the Wild.’ Even studying it afterwards, they seem to avoid or not mention the things I find most noteworthy.

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The lack of new information gives me no cause to adjust my route. Filled with self-righteous satisfaction, I start up the hill through well-kept villas. For ten minutes, I fall in with a vacationer from Holland, who is out giving his large young puppy a morning walk. The Dutch puppy much prefers plumping down for long rests.

As we enter real countryside, we pass a smart chapel to St Roch, patron saint of pet dogs, and, at the height of his mediaeval repute, also a good saint to invoke against the plague. The Netherlander and his reluctant consort peel off to their holiday cottage. I thank St Roch for the blessing of my own pet dog Einstein’s more reliable company. His small legs take him dashing heroically forward and then nervously back behind me throughout the walk, but he never holds me back, even if he does sometimes limp the following day.

Perhaps St Roch thinks I’m too pleased with myself. I’m half way up the first steep slope when I remember my stick, propped up against the unhelpful map in Godinne. I can’t remember why I bought the alpenstock on a skiing holiday in Austria in 1976, and my Brux-to-Lux Trail is the first time I’m really using it. I trudge back down, pick it up and start uphill again. The slip adds three kilometres walking to my day.

Luckily, the June weather is glorious and today’s path passes through a pleasing mix of woods, fields and villages. The day-stage is 20.7 km long, of which two thirds is on paths. The rolling countryside is apparently pure enough to attract many brickwork substations above hillside springs, collecting water for Vivaqua, the main Belgian water company.

History is never far away. Today’s surprises start with the sudden appearance by the side of the path of a neat stone wall covered in moss. A plastic-covered sign identifies it as the parapet of the Tunnel of Yvoir, “known as the Hitler Tunnel”. I scramble down to take a look at what turns out to be a perfectly formed railway tunnel of 1906. The rails are overgrown and a flock of chickens are pecking on the entirely green platform of the small, forgotten station a few dozen metres farther on. But locals remember that German trains in the Second World War found the tunnel’s one-kilometre length a comforting shelter from possible Allied air attack.

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Trains seem to be how powerful people did international travel in the early 20th century, like the North Korean dictator today. The train of German Leader Adolf Hitler himself was supposed to overnight in this tunnel on a trip through occupied Europe in October 1940, after which he was expected to meet the Belgian King. Hitler’s train couldn’t climb the gradient so he actually spent the night in the Yvoir station hotel on 22 October. In the end, he only stayed for several hours, abandoning his planned meeting with Leopold III. He had to push on to Italy, where he had urgent business with his Axis ally Benito Mussolini, who was preparing to launch a disastrous 26 October invasion of Greece without Hitler’s backing.

The only top German commander’s train to really hide in the tunnel was that of Hermann Göring, in June-July 1940. During his weeks based in Yvoir, Hitler’s number two and head of Germany’s air force had an almost imperial Roman palace set up for himself in a Catholic school nearby. It was decorated with artwork and furnishings purloined from the best local houses, a cold swimming pool surrounded by laurel trees, and warm baths heated up by a parked steam locomotive. Nevertheless he preferred the Château de Tricointe, a kilometre back along the trail. Supposedly, after the war, the owner abandoned the room that Göring liked and thereafter only used it for his dogs.

Stone country

I don’t walk into the dark tunnel, although anyone can. I am more intrigued by a cheerful caravan next to the disused railway line. ‘Stage Door’ says a colourful sign into its garden. After this I go through a small village strung out along a lane, past a small Belgian bluestone works and start another steep climb through woods out of the valley.

At a junction of forest paths at the top I’m intrigued by an opening in the thick trees. Following a short path to it I find myself looking over a cliff into a vast gravel quarry that has eaten up most of the hill opposite. A sign tells me that it’s one of the few quarries still in business in a region that once produced so much cut stone, aggregate and gravel that it was called ‘stone country.’

My path onward skirts the edge of the quarry before emerging from the woods into a field, the sandy path nearly white between full-grown ears of wheat. Half a kilometre later I’m on narrow paths between villas and then walking through the stone-built heart of Evrehailles, a dramatic village of conical towers, an old church and farm houses with their typical large arched doorways for the haycarts of former times.

A few hundred yards of well-kept modern suburb leads me to the edge of Evrehailles, across a main road and onto a gravel track back into the countryside. If I had realised this at the time, after 1.3 km I could have kept going on the track for a one-kilometre round trip to the remaining walls of the Château de Poilvache – ruined in vicious feudal feuding in mediaeval times – overlooking the river Meuse. Instead, I turn left onto a pretty forest path back down toward the riverbank, accompanied through the dense leaves by intense birdsong. Looking back up from the ancient stone village of Houx, I see some of Poilvache’s much-reduced curved ramparts.

I can now continue to Dinant along the shorter river path. But a moment’s pause by the picnic tables overlooking the water convinces me not to. The northern end of the island in the river opposite is one place Nazi Germany’s armies crossed the Meuse on 13 May 1940. No sign of that today, of course, but there’s too much main road, too many cars, too much feel of everyday business. So I stick to my plan and take the long way round to Dinant through the woods.

A wrong turn

Following the dot on the map on my phone, I slip behind an old stone barn and find a good footpath back up the riverside slope. My preference for the smallest footpaths means that I am planning to take one called “Sentier No. 10”. After 600 metres, I turn left to reach it.

The path seems unusually overgrown, but passable. But to join Sentier No. 10, I am now given a digital order to plunge into a field full of chest-high nettles and weeds and reach a copse on the other side. Einstein disagrees and watches me wade in. On my phone, my electronic dot is right on the line. Losing sight of me half-way to the copse, Einstein’s nerve breaks. He tries to follow me, leaping up for each step as if jumping over stormy waves in the sea. I double back and pick him up.

We reach an old barbed wire fence round the copse on the other side. On one post, I see a card with what look like symbols for some kind of cross-country race. A path, directions, hope that I’m in the right place? I thank the stars again for my smartphone, on which I’ve become completely dependent. There’s no need to relive my teenage panic on a night orienteering exercise with paper map and compass, part of our compulsory training as military cadets at school. I got hopelessly lost, but I had the unit radio, and messed up everyone’s night with my ridiculous and fruitless appeals for help. (”I can see a dark tree ahead on my right”, etc). That earned another big black mark against me with the sergeant-major.

I now see many dark trees ahead on my right and left as I battle my way through the undergrowth in the copse. Animal tracks criss-cross below my knees, any of which could be the line of the supposed path on my phone. Or not. The human sign was a mirage. Einstein, stuck in a thorny thicket again, looks at me resentfully. I give up. The map used by my app, which has guided me faultlessly for more than 100 km, must be wrong. Ceci n’est pas Sentier No. 10, if it exists. We fight our way back to the overgrown path.

I plot an alternative route and Einstein and I get under way again. Sunshine is soon streaming onto the clear earth tracks of a wide avenue of evenly planted trees and neatly stacked woodpiles. Too even and too neat, perhaps. Indeed, as I pass onto a road, a “propriété privée” sign tells me I have no right to be here. I continue on my new route into another forest. But after a few hundred metres, a key turn in the track tells me I’m entering private property again.

Taking another way round would add kilometres, so I keep on going. I cross another public road to continue on the wide-open track. A new sign and wooden barrier gate announce that this too is “propriété privée”. No turning back now. A few hundred metres in, I see a pick-up parked in a clearing and hear a chain-saw at work in the trees. I walk a bit faster. All this trespassing is making me anxious.

Normally, hiking in Belgium is remarkably straightforward, unlike, say, the UK, where lordly estates often block walkers in the most attractive parts of the regular countryside. I realise later that I normally plan my routes on a big screen, while on my phone I am not spotting the little no entry signs on tracks on the map. After four kilometres of stubborn trespassing, I gratefully rejoin the proper grand randonnée path. (The Komoot/GPS routes given below for this day-stage have been fully corrected for these mistakes, don’t worry!)

Descent into Dinant

Walking blamelessly again on GR 126, I can return to a more everyday anxiety: avoiding stretches of mud by weaving along a sinuous parallel side path between a confusion of close-set saplings. At the top of the hill the path breaks out into the open with fine views of open fields and hills stretching to the border with France, now just 15 km to the south.

The track ends with a choice for the last kilometre: either GR 126 as it runs alongside what looks like a rather hot, barren quarry, or taking a twisting road cut into cliffs and steep slopes over the Meuse. I choose the road, since it has good views and traffic seems scant. Soon I fork left onto a path down past the Abbey of Our Lady of Leffe. It looks modest from the outside, despite being world-famous thanks to the beer the monks began brewing eight centuries ago (no longer produced here, but by AB InBev under licence in Leuven.) Inside looks lovely, though, and you’re seeking a retreat you can spend a couple of nights or more if you book a week a head. Official pilgrims on their way to Spain’s St James of Compostela – Dinant is on one of half a dozen Camino de Santiago routes through Belgium – can stay for free.

The Meuse-side highway is busy so I prefer to do the last half kilometre south on a parallel road into town, Rue St Pierre. I’m in luck. Works on the road have banished all cars. The 19th century houses look handsome without all that distracting metal, glass, plastic and rubber in front of them. I pass by a group of tourists being lectured in front of the birthplace of Adolphe Sax, the Belgian who invented the saxophone in the 1840s and many other musical instruments. Squares, bridges and banners across streets all celebrate the local hero with outsize and garishly painted statues and images of saxophones.

The saxophone is not Dinant’s only moment to march with history. At the end of the main bridge over the Meuse is a plaque and cartoon see-through statue in honour of Charles de Gaulle, the 20th century French general, president and statesman. On 15 August 1914, during the lethally chaotic early days of the First World War, invading German troops captured the east bank of Dinant and forced the French army over the bridge to the west side. It was at this moment that then Lieutenant de Gaulle led a brave counter-charge on German army machine guns on the east bank. He was hit in the leg and injured. The bridge now bears his name.

The silver lining on the cloud was that by the next day he was able to be evacuated and tended to by his older sister Marie-Agnès at her modest house 50 km to the west in Charleroi. She was married to a Belgian engineer, who worked at one of Belgium’s great coal mines nearby. De Gaulle moved on to hospital and was back in action two months later. Marie-Agnès went on to become a resistance heroine of the Second World War.

The German army pushed on westward, taking Charleroi six days later. I have not heard much talk about the 1914 Battle of the Frontiers before. I am to learn more about its local ravages on later stages of the Trail.

You can download the GPX file for the Namur-Godinne route for free here and or by navigating along this hiking route on my Brux-to-Lux Trail collection on Komoot, the hiking app.

A overview video of the route is available here – along with some more video shorts that I’ll be making in the coming weeks.

My 26 April 2026 piece in the Brussels Times about the journey is here.

If you’ve enjoyed a walk or a piece of writing, you’re very welcome to make a one-off contribution toward trains, maps, and time on the road.

Help me blaze new trails

If you’d like to offer closer support, you can also take out a paid subscription. Alongside the free material, subscribers can:

• submit specific questions about the route or the project

• receive occasional behind-the-scenes posts

Just fill in your email and click below for all the options:

I’ve met the river in many places before: in Liège (Luik in Dutch), the cradle of Belgium’s industrial revolution, while urbexing with my daughter through abandoned collieries and ironworks along its banks; in the Dutch city of Maastricht, with its Roman stone bridge over the water; or while crossing the great expanse of Hollands Diep, south of Rotterdam. At the latter point it must be one of the widest waterways in Europe, where most of the waters of the Meuse empty into the North Sea, 950 km from its source deep in eastern France.

As I make my way down to the river in Namur, I meet a mix of run-down passageways and delightful surprises. The town’s station boasts a remarkable open steel staircase. The hotel opposite has a gorgeous Art Nouveau entranceway. A coffee roaster in the old town smells so good I can’t resist buying a pack of their Italian mix beans.

Then I cross the Sambre and stand at the point where it joins the Meuse. The thick low walls of the Namur citadel climb the high hill behind me. On one rampart, a cartoon-like statue of a man riding a six-ton bronze turtle surveys the scene. It’s called “Searching for Utopia.” The pleasing image is somewhat spoiled when I read of the 2018 conviction of its creator, Belgian artist Jan Faber, for indecent assault on a woman and other offences. Many in the art world defend him and his work. These various realities live on, Belgian style, side by side.

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There’s little time for utopia-seeking turtle rides today. Namur deserves its own visit. Still, I want to see more of the citadel, even though it would be quicker to continue southward along the riverbank path. So I climb up past the western side of the fortress, through archways that pierce some impressively thick walls and up onto delightful parkland paths. At the top, I’m back amid the fancy houses of the millionaire mile. From there I take a small path back down through the forest to the Meuse. The last part is quite a scramble down a wooded slope. There’s even a rope to hang on to.

When I get back down to the Meuse, I’m glad I went off piste for a while. The river is wide and full, but the walk along the river is not the inspiring encounter I imagined with a grand European waterway. The smooth tarmac path along the bank is fine for a regular stroll, but it feels like a motorway in comparison with my out-of-the way paths on the Brux-to-Lux Trail so far. Cars are never far away, and trains too. Most distracting are the bicyclists whizzing past every few minutes, tinging at wandering walkers and forcing me to pull my dog Einstein out of their way.

Even though I’ve managed to fill 80% of today’s 23.4 km walk with paths, not roads, the 10 km during which I follow the river feels too similar to my built-up urban life. The one consolation is admiring the architecture in the buildings. Just as in the streets around my Schaerbeek home, Belgians have a genius for expressing their individualism in their houses. Along the Meuse are examples from every period over the past two or three centuries. These range from fine 19th century mixed brick and stonework, the archetype of the Meuse style of façade, to 1930s Art Deco. There’s plenty of the tough grey-blue limestone that frames Belgian street architecture, Belgian bluestone, much of which is quarried from near the Meuse. Luckily there are no candidates here for Ugly Belgian Houses, a social media feed that takes a pitiless look at some eccentric new-builds in the Belgian suburbs.

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I stop for lunch at a table by the river overlooking the Isle of Dave, which sounds quaint in English, but, about a kilometre long, rejoices in the honour of being Belgium’s biggest island. I regret not stopping to reinforce my picnic with a punnet of strawberries from a kiosk in Wépion, a sweet spot for Belgian strawberries that even signposts a museum in honour of the fruit. Barges chug up and down. A pleasure boat cruises back and forth, serving a long business lunch. On the bank opposite, a stone quarry has taken a great bite out of one the steep hills rising from the river. A speedboat buzzes up with a water-skier in tow, sending up perfectly formed arcs of spray from well-honed loops.

I can’t wait to get back into the trees. Luckily a loop in the woods behind the town of Profondeville is in the plan. Whether a profound or superficial choice, this means I will be missing the Chemin Philosophique, or Philosophical Way, which gives walkers plaques with wise thoughts from 20-odd European thinkers. It was put up along the river walkway by the municipality’s “Pierre de Meuse” House of Secularism. Here, at least, it seems that Belgium’s mighty Catholic Church has a rival.

I spot my escape route next to the road, a path heading through a small hole into the wall of green. As I’m enveloped in a tunnel of nature, my spirits rise. My route crosses through villages in side valleys – once popping me out of the forest, across a busy road, and then plunging me back in again – and my path even winds through the buildings of a Catholic boarding school. I feel better surrounded by the woods, the sun playing through the leaves and the earthen paths. A long, gentle slope switchbacking down to the river makes the perfect ending of the day. I cross a bridge over the Meuse and reach the railway station at Godinne.

The Brux-to-Lux Trail in the Brussels Times

As a postscript to last week’s note to you, my readers, I’m pleased to note that a piece about The Brux-to-Lux Trail was published here by the Brussels Times on 26 April 2026. It explains more about the chance events that pushed me to walk to Luxembourg and gives an overview of the main sections of the trail. Here’s an excerpt about how I find that walking in Belgium differs from elsewhere in Europe:

Routes along pretty rivers do not suddenly stop dead for lordly estates, as they do in England. Paths are almost never overgrown, unlike, say, rural Italy or France. And the route through the Ardennes to Luxembourg ensures there are plenty of rolling hills too.

As I pieced the stages together, I was lucky that I could count on Belgium’s excellent network of local trains and buses. It’s true that, later on, travel did take me up to three hours each way. But the trains are comfortable, often have power sockets and I always got a seat.

All this meant I could walk a long-distance trail and be back in my own bed every night. I didn’t have to go to the expense of a hotel or a restaurant if I didn’t want to. I didn’t have to carry anything much. I could walk only when the weather suited me. And I had time to recover between the longer hikes.

I also updated the map of the whole trail from the introductory Substack article to go with the Brussels Times piece:

You can download the GPX file for the Namur-Godinne route for free here (coming soon) and or by navigating along this hiking route on my Brux-to-Lux Trail collection on Komoot, the hiking app.

A overview video of the route is available here – along with some more shorts that I’ll be making in the coming weeks.

If you’ve enjoyed a walk or a piece of writing, you’re very welcome to make a one-off contribution toward trains, maps, and time on the road.

Help me blaze new trails

If you’d like to offer closer support, you can also take out a paid subscription. Alongside the free material, subscribers can:

• submit specific questions about the route or the project

• receive occasional behind-the-scenes posts

Subscribe now

I would have missed this deep dive into nature had I followed the official grand randonnée route for the first two-thirds of today’s 15.6 km walk to Namur. GR 412, GR 125 and GR 126 – the thin blue lines on the map below – take roads for 62% of their route, sometimes through built-up streets. By contrast, the green-as-possible route I mapped out for the Brux-to-Lux Trail yields real paths for 76% of the walk between the same two first way-points, and 74% for the whole day. The gorgeous glory of wandering here by the river makes the planning feel like victory.

There is one small drawback in this paradise, however. I notice it when I try to record the birdsong. Normally my difficulty as a sound engineer is with my dog Einstein’s light but enthusiastic panting. Today, I can barely record for half a minute without hearing a train, truck or machine somewhere in the middle distance. The Sambre valley has for centuries attracted industrial activity, with ships easily able to transport goods to the rest of the Low Countries, and indeed to the world beyond, through the great sea ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam.

When I rejoin the river, a barge is backing upstream, its dry bulk cargo hold empty and its bow cocked in the air. On its side, a pictograph boasts the boat can carry the same weight as 156 road trucks. At the back, the barge owner’s living quarters have enough plate glass windows for a suburban house. On the roof are two family cars, with a winch alongside them to get them on the road.

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My wife Jessica is with me too and leads the way as we follow the river path. On the far bank is a church and the millennium-old Floreffe Abbey. The ribbed and double onion spires of the religious complex rise high over the landscape. The monastic order that built them never recovered from the 1790s invasion by French Revolutionary forces, however. The buildings now house a school.

We buy a picnic at a street market in the village below, including the world’s most expensive handful of olives. (We didn’t know this, but food and beer are available in an old grange that is now the Floreffe abbey brewery.) We leave the village by a path hidden between the houses. Half way up the hill on the other side we stop to eat our lunch by a farm track. Sitting on the the verge, we can see the abbey on its hilltop and the whole valley and below us.

The farm track continues over the hill and down to the next Sambre-side village of Malonne. The onward path winds its way between the houses and back up, this time to the Bois de la Basse Marlagne. This great wood is 4 km long and 1 km-2 km deep, covering the ridge that rises 120 metres above the south bank of the Sambre. The path is good, but initially whole stretches of trees seem dead or catastrophically sick, with many fallen over each other. In a life of a local 7th century abbott written in the Dark Ages, a monastic scribe says that Basse Marlagne Wood is home to ferocious beasts, a refuge for brigands and an “abode of demons”.

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Spooky spirits

Spooky spirits still lurk here. After nearly a kilometre through the forests we see an crumbling outlook tower for the defunct 1892 Fort of Malonne, one of several that was supposed to guard the defensive perimeter of Namur. The fort was never much use, abandoned by its garrison in the First World War and surrendered in the Second after its commander unsurprisingly ran out of ammunition. (Lying just south of the trail nearby, it is now being conquered by the forest and is closed to visitors.) We pass a field of stumpy cairns under the trees, looking for all the world like a convention of trolls surprised at dawn and turned to stone in the dappled sunlight. A few hundred metres further I stop to step inside a concrete bunker astride the path. I surprise an unkempt man squatting on his haunches just inside the entrance. Eyes bright in contrast to his mud-streaked face, he looks at me fiercely from behind a curtain of long, clotted hair. He seems to belong here. We don’t speak and I back quickly out.

While high on the ridge path, we get glimpses through the trees of factories, highways and railway martialing yards by the Sambre below. That changes as we approach Namur, the capital of Belgium’s French-speaking region of Wallonia. Peeping through the still mostly leafless branches here are the first villas of what must be one of its richer suburbs. When the path breaks out of the forest and onto the tarmac we find ourselves in a full-fledged millionaires’ mile. The grandeur of the houses in their acre-sized parks overlooking the valley of the River Meuse (Maas in Dutch/Flemish) gives a striking sense of deep-rooted wealth.

School has broken up for the day, with uniformed children gathering on the wide, soft, grassy verges of the road. Two schoolboys hurry past us, strangely upbeat. We see the reason why a few yards later. A young teenager in a hoodie stands astride his scooter, checking his phone, presumably for the next illicit sale. He stares sourly back at our judgmental looks, pulls his hood down further and scootles off.

The grand buildings only get bigger. Soon we are admiring the Chateau of Namur, a 19th century pile overlooking the city and the confluence of the Sambre and Meuse (Maas in Dutch/Flemish). It’s now a hotel and restaurant decked out in flags. We walk on to catch our own first glimpse of the river valley. From a well-placed bench high above the houses and dense woods along the river banks, we can see the wide Meuse’s course from the south for a dozen kilometres.

We make our way slowly down to the river along the eastern wall of Namur’s extraordinary fortress. I will return another day with grandchildren to explore its underground passageways, poison gas-proof bunkers and other delights. The citadel is more than a millennium old and one of the biggest such fortresses in Europe. Partly demolished by France’s revolutionary armies under Napoleon, who called it “the ant-heap of Europe” for its many tunnels, it was as unable as the Fort of Malonne to resist the German invasions of 1914 or 1940.

What remains of the thick walls of the citadel are low, grey and hard to grasp from any angle. The strongest forts must, I suppose, prioritise raw force over manorial trimmings. The city comes into view, but does not open up easily either. The buildings are set close, often made from dark materials. There is little vegetation to break up the view. The trail is taking me, village by village, towards a more Central European aesthetic. The churches are imposing, but something in me rebels against some heavy baroque facades. Striking to look at, they don’t seem to have enough space. Perhaps not surprisingly, given its fortress history, Namur seems to be a town closed in against a potentially hostile outside world.

Under the steeply rising cables of a téléphérique up to the top of the fortress, we find a rare café on the bricks and stones of the Sambre quayside. No food is served before 5pm, but the menus are good for shading our heads from a now hot sun. For the first time, I taste the excellent and refreshing local beer, Blanche de Namur.

A pause to say thanks

It’s time to pause and raise a glass to you, dear readers. One third of the way along my 360 km journey on foot from Brussels to Luxembourg, and two months after I started these weekly musings about each day’s walk, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their interest and unexpected support.

I love to hear from those people who have already been inspired to try The Brux-to-Lux Trail for themselves. Paid subscriber G.C. started out last week and wrote to say “We love it!” The weekend before, even though she chose a rainy day, donor M.S. told me she found the trail was “lovely to do with your words in our head … Belgian guided walks so often go along roads, so it was wonderful to be on real paths.”

As the weather warms, I hope many more will try. More than 2,000 people have read these first posts on Substack. At least 3,000 people have watched the two videos so far (easiest to find here). On two main social media platforms, my occasional posts about the trail have recorded well over 50,000 impressions.

I was particularly pleased to see the Brux-to-Lux Trail get a shoutout from Cultural Routes in Turkey (above). I lived for three decades in Istanbul, and one of my inspirations for trying to create a unique route from Brussels to Luxembourg was seeing how hiking activists in Turkey created extraordinary trails from scratch. Chief among these are the Lycian Way, pioneered by Kate Clow, and the Evliya Çelebi Way, in which Caroline Finkel played a leading role.

I hope this welcome digital attention for my Brux-to-Lux Trail means that more people are looking for an off-ramp from our ultra-processed, fragmented digital worlds and, like me, finding it on paths through nature. One of the glories of these days out in the open countryside is how completely I am able to clear my mind of my usual concerns. While walking, I almost never look at my phone, only using it to check for a next turning, or to shoot yet another photo of the path ahead as it winds its way between the streams, fields and trees.

You can download the GPX file for the Franière-Namur route for free here and or by navigating along this hiking route on my Brux-to-Lux Trail collection on Komoot, the hiking app.

If you’ve enjoyed a walk or a piece of writing, you’re very welcome to make a one-off contribution toward trains, maps, and time on the road.

Help me blaze new trails

If you’d like to offer closer support, you can also take out a paid subscription. Alongside the free material, subscribers can:

• submit specific questions about the route or the project

• receive occasional behind-the-scenes posts

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One thing is clear, though. The journey so far has sharpened my desire to get away to the countryside. The Brussels-Luxembourg railway line is critical to me getting to the start of each day’s walk along my Brux-to-Lux Trail, and back home at the end. But Brussels-North station and its surroundings always trigger my sense of the downside shocks of urban life.

My home street is a pretty survival from the late 19th century. But my route to Brussels-North requires walking first across Liedts Square, one of the city’s ugliest jumbles of low-rise old buildings, intersecting tram lines, car-clogged roads, ill-considered pedestrian zones and garishly competing snack restaurants. Then I go down Brabant Street, its narrow pavements strewn with litter from yesterday’s crowds. People come here from all over Benelux – and often as far away as France and Germany – to buy cheap neo-oriental clothing, good-value curtains or heady Arabian-style incense.

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Reaching a parallel road leading to the station, I pass a line of shop windows displaying teenage girl prostitutes on barstools who pout, jiggle or pointedly study their phones. Then I run a gauntlet of rough and cocky drug dealers. I’ve been pickpocketed near here twice. Quite often there are scuffles. I side-step a staggering junkie as I head through the station’s new glass doors, which are crazed by the impact of some crashing weight. I have recently rediscovered an alpenstock that I bought in Austria in 1976. The stout stick makes little difference on the mild hills of my trail, but carrying it in my hand here makes me feel stronger.

Once inside Brussels-North, the atmosphere improves with some new shops and a recent facelift that enhances the 1950s main hall. But the ceilings of the main passages to the platforms remain claustrophobically low. Surfaces are grimy. The cantilevered roofs sheltering the platforms already look drearily stained again.

Over the concrete platform roofs loom the glass-windowed, mid-sized skyscrapers round the station. The district is a cornerstone of Brussels’ 1950s ambition to reinvent itself as a mini-Manhattan, and it has been under-used ever since. The mad modernisers even tore down the grand original Brussels-North station. The neo-classical building from 1846 once rivalled any terminus in, say, Paris.

This haphazard, corrupt craze of national self-harm even coined an architectural term, ‘Brusselisation’. Civic pride collapsed. Not many remember now that it was Belgians who built the first passenger train in continental Europe, which left from a station close by in 1835. I’m grateful that the railway line to Luxembourg was one of the first long-distance routes, opening in the 1850s. I expect to be weaving round it for at least the first third of my 360 km walk. Soon the yellow lettering on the electronic board tells me that my train is approaching.

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The few people traveling today step aboard. The blue-uniformed conductor brings his whistle up to his lips, pauses to look up and down the train, gives two shrill trills to let the driver know he’s free to go, steps in, twists his triangular key and his personal door sighs shut. I love this tradition, honoured at every station. (But if you’re late for a Belgian train, beware of trying to board it through this last open door. My Dutch wife was once kicked back off by the Flemish conductor. She then told the protesting Jessica: “Darn it! You’re not in Holland here, you stuck-up little madam!”)

The start of today’s walk will be where my last day out ended at Ronce near Gembloux, in the heart of Belgium’s barley-growing country. The first leg is a 40-minute journey, time enough to reflect more on the past industrial glory of my latest adopted home. Visiting friends far away in the south of France recently, I was surprised to see some century-old iron farm equipment in their barn proudly emblazoned “Mélotte Gembloux”. I learn now that in the 1930s, 600 people were employed at the Mélotte ironworks making ploughs and more. The factory slumped after the Second World War. In 1976, the company, now making car parts, was sold to Britain’s Lucas Industries.

Lucas! How well I remember the name. The brand seemed to feature on every cracked, badly designed and malfunctioning electrical part of my first car, a 1967 Triumph. Each day I spent deconstructing bits of its engine involved cursing Lucas. Small wonder that within two decades, Mélotte’s metal-workers left their factory for the last time and the company died.

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My mind is still distracted when I detrain in Gembloux. I wait at the wrong place for the hourly bus onward. As it comes sweeping round the corner, picking up speed, I have to throw myself into the road. The surprised driver kindly stops to let the stick-waving tourist aboard. When I don’t have the right change for the fare, not for the first or last time on this long journey, he just waves me wearily to a seat.

Detox is called for, and is luckily supplied the moment I rejoin The Brux-to-Lux Trail at Ronce. I am constantly delighted at how, as I walk out of a Belgian village, the lane turns smoothly from asphalt to gravel to earthen track to footpath.

I’m quickly in wide open fields. Unusually, the public right of way goes diagonally across a field, freshly harrowed and planted for spring. Further on, my path is just a pale tear between two enormous fields, with no hedge or other vegetation to define it at all. In the lines of trees on the horizon, a faint fuzz of leaves is just beginning to appear on dense fans of branches. Early sprouters and some trees that get sunlight are boasting occasional splashes of many shades of green.

Today’s walk is 20 km long and is the first that I’ve planned on Komoot, the hiking app. I’m clumsy using it. I add waypoints without meaning to, miss one turning briefly and am generally unsure what it’s trying to tell me. But it is wonderful to be able to pinpoint the unpaved paths that go through or alongside woods and streams and avoid towns. Rightly or wrongly, this preference explains why for much of this stage I do not follow the Belgian official GR 126 long-distance path (the thinner blue line on the map); another reason is that I only realised this trail leads southward from Brussels after I had finished my own trail. Overall, a satisfactory two-thirds of today’s route is on paths and hiking paths. The roads are mostly quiet country lanes.

One mis-step is deliberate. I like varied landscapes, and I cheekily want to see if I can hike through a golf course on my way. A few yards in, my dog Einstein and I stumble onto a party of elderly golfers. They don’t tell us to scram directly, but they do warn that we might be hit on the head by a ball. We turn back and skirt the perimeter.

Gradually, too, the landscape is changing from fields to small valleys, a hint of the Ardennes to come. Streams begin to multiply. There’s a pretty footbridge over a river near the golf course clubhouse. I sit on it to enjoy a rare treat: a thermos pot from home full of hot chickpea, tomato and chilli soup.

As I leave the flat and open farming countryside, signs of urban life and lines of communication begin to return. I follow a railway spur along a valley that has clearly been a passageway for centuries, to judge by a chateau that suddenly towers above us. It’s an eclectic mix of fortified farm, mediaeval towers and fancy 18th century upgrades.

I also pass under the dingy concrete pylons of southern Belgium’s main east-west E42 highway, which runs from the old coal-and-steel city of Liège (Luik in Dutch/Flemish) to the Belgian rust belt town of Charleroi and then to Lille (Rijsel) in France. High above me, the rumbling trucks belong to another map, indeed another world. Down here the blossom is out and wild flowers are plentiful on sunny banks underneath the trees.

Protected from modern times by the long highway viaduct, I reach the pretty village of Onoz. This walk is confirming my sense that Belgian placenames are exotic and unique, distinct from those in neighbouring France, Holland and Germany. The country does not just have a singular love affair with traffic jams of consonants and names ending in the letters x and z. Today, I am passing signs to towns charmingly called Tongrinnes, Sombreffe, Wagnalée and Marbisoux.

Now I’m standing at the entrance of a village called Spy. Time for a selfie. Many people, including one of my daughters, think that my decades as a reporter in the Middle East mean I must have been one. They aren’t wrong to suspect it: four countries did try to recruit me as an informant. But I never wanted that kind of money or man-on-the-inside feeling enough. Instead I am where I am today, striding with my dog along what are now a series of muddy paths through the Belgian woods, beholden to nobody and thinking it a fine day out.

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When I break back out into the open, I’m almost on top of the wide river Sambre. Already, the last half of the walk has been accompanied by several stretches of fast-running water. The rushing sound will become pleasantly familiar over the next several stages of my Brux-to-Lux Trail. After the Sambre, I will follow the course of the rivers Meuse (Maas), Lesse and Lomme, and cross many of the streams flowing into them.

The branch railway line home also takes advantage of the Sambre river valley. I cross a bridge to the village of Franière, where there’s a station. I walk onto the platform just in time to meet a late-arriving train. On the way home I also catch a first glimpse of my next destination: the heavy grey capital of Wallonia, Namur.

You can download the GPX file for the Bousval-Franière route for free here and or navigate along this hiking route from my Brux-to-Lux Trail collection on Komoot, the hiking app.

If you’ve enjoyed a walk or a piece of writing, you’re very welcome to make a one-off contribution toward trains, maps, and time on the road.

Help me blaze new trails

If you’d like to offer closer support, you can also take out a paid subscription. Alongside the free material, subscribers can:

• submit specific questions about the route or the project

• receive occasional behind-the-scenes posts

Subscribe now

At the railway station of Ottignies-Louvain-La-Neuve, I’ve got a while to wait before a bus can take me deeper into rural Wallonia, Belgium’s French-speaking south. Today’s walk is clearly going to be a historical tour as well. The modest town’s many hyphens are matched by half a dozen flags on roundabouts and public buildings, greeting the visitor with red Walloon roosters, lions rampant of the Duchy of Brabant and the yellow-and-blue standard of not-so-distant lordly landowners.

My plan is to pick up my trail from Brussels to Luxembourg at the bus-stop in a village called Bousval, where I finished my last stage through the battlefield of Waterloo. Then I’ll walk almost 19 km to another bus-stop in Ronce, from where I can get home from the railway station at Gembloux. It’s the fifth of twenty one-day stages of my 360 km journey.

Today’s walk, in short, goes from the middle of nowhere to nowhere in particular. As often happens, though, what I see triggers my curiosity. I will be reading about aspects of this random walk for months to come. About religion in Belgium. About Roman roads. About language borders. About barley. About brewing. And about how a small population of Low Countries monks ever got so massively mixed up in the global business of beer.

I’ve already lost count of the path-side crosses, Virgin-Mary-in-the-niches, chapels, churches and abbeys that I’m finding alongside my Brux-to-Lux Trail. As I walk out of Bousval, my dog Einstein takes a drink from the Spring of St. Bartholemy. I inspect a nearby chapel to St. Barbe (St. Barbara). To help passers by like me, there’s a printed account about this possibly mythical third century AD maiden of the eastern Roman Empire. In a matter-of-fact way, it tells how she converted to Christianity and met dreadful torture and death at the hands of her father, a pagan lord.

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God vaporised St. Barbe’s murderous Dad with a lightning bolt, I learn later, so her martyrdom qualifies her to be the patron saint of artillerymen, naval marines, miners, sappers, firemen, geologists and other handlers of explosives. (Saints, I learn today, are busy people: Barbara also looks after architects, engineers, metallurgists, plasterers, masons, brush-makers, bell-ringers and bistrot-owners. I’d rather not think about another detail on the chapel wall. An abbot of Liège chose the cruelly crushed St. Barbe as the name for an 18th century “hospice for rebellious young girls.”)

The first climb up a sunken path into the woods clears my head. On the crest the country opens up into huge fields. My path approaches a striking small church standing on its own by a young tree, the Chapel of Try-au-Chêne. According to a stone inscription next to the door, Captain Thierry Le Jeune built it to thank God for saving him from “several perils of war over 30 years”. Inscribed in 1608, the worn, clear text feels like a living link to Europe’s turbulent wars of religion.

The memory is not as vivid, however, as the message on the flagstones in front of the locked chapel door. “Let us pray for child victims of the pedophile priests” is written in thick black marker pen on the paving stones. I know what it’s about. Belgian television is airing harrowing interviews with the survivors of a shocking pattern of predatory behaviour in Belgium’s Catholic hierarchy over the past century.

I walk along fine tracks that lead me to another forest. As I clamber down a steep wooded slope, I make out ruins through the trees. The site seems extensive. While planning my route I hadn’t paid attention to to much except keeping away from towns. As the remains of a gothic nave appear, I realise this is something big: Villers Abbey.

The well-kept site is worth a paying visit, if you can spare an hour or two. Aside from giving a good feel for an olden-days monastery, it has a modern winery, micro-brewery, and a decent-looking restaurant. I’ve toured it before, so today I press on as the trail passes through its ancient archways and next to the ruins of its old brewery.

Christian monasteries like Villers played a key role in the development of Belgian beer. There were hundreds of them before Napoleon’s revolutionary French armies laid them waste in the 1790s, as they did here in Villers. Even so, nearly 200 monasteries are still active. The brewing was not just because they had to supply the monks – at its peak, Villers Abbey was home to 400 people – with something healthier to drink than untreated water. All farms also supplied seasonal workers with beer, and monasteries were huge landowners. Villers alone owned 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres).

A fine cobbled road speeds my climb up the other side of the valley. I turn back onto earthen paths at yet another chapel, this one filled with fresh flowers. At a forest crossroads, I pause for a sandwich on a bench. I like the hilliness of the walk so far. I particularly enjoy a long, straight, gentle slope through a tunnel of overarching trees that feels like being shrunk into a pinhole camera.

Soon I’m passing a farm track called the “Chemin du Vénérable”, which has a sign below it explaining that vénérable means the consecrated host, the transubstantiated disc of biscuit given to the Christian faithful at mass. It’s a relief from all the holiness when the next farm track is named plain old Wolves’ Oak Way. Here the busy local sign-makers tell me wolf carcasses were strung up here to keep other wolves out of the village.

The break for secular power dynamics is short-lived. Next up is a white mansion in Gentinnes that once housed a school for Catholic missionaries. It’s now called the Abbey of the Kongolo Memorial, in memory of a massacre of young Belgian missionaries during the Congolese war of independence. The path winds round the fine property and on into a wood.

Down a small side-path through the trees, I spy yet another little chapel. A hand-painted sign points to a “hermitage”. An information board explains that hermits in the 17th and 18th century weren’t like anchorites in their cells or stylites sitting on columns. They were local priests who only lived somewhat apart from the community. They also said mass for family in the chateau, taught classes in a schoolhouse and farmed a small field assigned to them.

After the last house of Gentinnes – and past yet another chapel on the hill above, neatly poised at the corner of a wood – the horizon gradually opens up around me. Enormous tractors are furrowing fields that seem to be kilometres long and wide. The path is a sandy ribbon winding through a vast carpet of bright green spring shoots. The few trees and farmhouses look small. In this larger-than-life landscape, I feel suddenly exposed.

The former silence of the trail is ruffled by a slow parade of airliners banking for their final descent to Charleroi airport, 15 km to the west. Tall electricity wind turbines turn in the distance. I walk right under the windmills, which I’ve never done before. Propeller blades, each one a dozen storeys high, sweep down with a slow, swelling swish-whop, swish-whop, swish-whop. Red lettering tells me: ‘Beware of falling ice’.

Another sign lets me know that I have joined the Route du Malt, the Malt Route. The idea, it seems, is to visit farms, breweries, malting houses and thus to promote the use of Belgian crops, since nearly all of the barley used by today’s 400 official Belgian breweries is imported. Local producers like Belgomalt boast that their malts supply notes of vanilla, honey, caramel, chocolate, plum and even coffee. A good place to find out more is likely the Bertinchamps brewery 200 metres further along the road, one of the few sourcing all its barley locally. It was closed to visitors when I passed on a weekday, but is open for tasting and snacks on weekends and at other times for groups. Don’t worry: it’s not far from the end of the walk.

Making beer in Belgium has always been an eclectic, ever-changing and almost everyday activity. Alongside the monasteries, most Belgian farms (or rather the farmers’ wives) used to make their own “saison” beers to encourage those bringing the harvest in. Archaeologists have discovered a brewery and malthouse dating back to Roman times, and Belgian friends all seem to know somebody trying their hand at the craft. Breweries keep appearing all along my Brux-to-Lux Trail, and indeed near my Brussels home.

No wonder that Belgian brewers also have the world’s most diverse range of brewing styles. They pick up ideas from neighbours, like Germany’s pilsner and England’s India pale ales, or add merino cherries and secondary fermentation to the indigenous sour lambics and gueuzes of Brussels. The famed high-alcohol dubbels and tripels now synonymous with the ‘monastic’ style are actually innovations that are only 90 years old. The country may be small, but world’s biggest brewing concern is Belgium’s AB InBev.

Brewing and religion often get tangled up too, as they have in today’s walk. Just off my last stage through the Waterloo battlefield, for instance, a brewery is attached to the defunct nunnery of Aywiers. Like the microbrewery in Villers, Aywiers is one of the “abbey beers”. These are named for a religious order that at some point produced beer. For that privilege, they pay a dividend to that order or, if defunct, to a charitable ecclesiastical cause. The label of Aywiers brand Lutgarde IPA, however, is anything but pious: a suggestive nun with her finger to her lips.

A brilliant study of the use of jolly ecclesiasticals to sell Belgian beer by academic Isabelle Jonveaux tells me more later. The country’s six Trappist breweries play the role of “haute couture” houses, she says. The Trappists have the most notable brands, strictest rules, highest prices and little or no advertising. The Abbey beers are more permissive. Then come the “ecclesiasticals”, which are frankly transgressive. Their labels put halos on the foaming beer, not the holy men, or pay the reverse compliment of using brand names like Lucifer or Satan.

This stretch of the Malt Route is actually on a Roman road now known as the Via Belgica. It was one of the most important European highways of ancient times, running west to east from Boulogne on the English channel, through here, over the Roman bridge in Maastricht and then on to Cologne.

Some scholars think the Via Belgica even marked the original pre-modern border between French/Walloon heirs of Latin (40% of today’s population of Belgium) and those speaking more northerly Germanic/Flemish dialects (60%). The dividing line has remained remarkably stable: despite centuries of Francophone political and cultural dominance, today’s border of Wallonia is roughly where I started today, about 20 km to the north.

Traffic takes other roads now. Nothing except the Via Belgica’s straightness looks Roman any more. I stay with it for a couple of hundred yards until I can turn back south towards Luxembourg. And yes: in front of a tree, there’s an imposing Belgian bluestone granite pedestal topped by a niche. Professionally carved into the side overlooking the path is a name: St Eloi.

I approach the niche’s glass door and behind it see a painted statue of a bishop with an anvil and a hammer in his hand. I look St. Eloi up. A goldsmith who rose high in the Frankish court in the sixth century AD, Bishop Eloi (or Eligius) founded monasteries and converted the pagans of Flanders. The saint still has many irons in the fire: he’s the patron of farriers, horses and at least 12 other professions, from goldsmiths to car mechanics to computer scientists.

It’s been a long, intense day through a much-signposted middle of nowhere. I feel like I’m on a treasure hunt, even if I’m not sure what I’m finding. Perhaps, the less history a place has, the more it has to talk it up. This is what I understand from a sign early on, under a square metal letterbox by a suburban house driveway in Bousval: “In this place, on 23 June 1427 at 11:41, absolutely nothing happened.”

My last stretch is a grassy path behind the gardens and chicken coops of the village of Ronce, strung out along the provincial highway. I find my bus stop. Soon I’m heading home to Brussels for the night. I have a good thirst for that Belgian beer now.

You can download the GPX file for the La Hulpe-Bousval route for free here and or by navigating along this hiking route on my Brux-to-Lux Trail collection on Komoot, the hiking app.

If you’ve enjoyed a walk or a piece of writing, you’re very welcome to make a one-off contribution toward trains, maps, and time on the road.

Help me blaze new trails

If you’d like to offer closer support, you can also take out a paid subscription. Alongside the free material, subscribers can:

• submit specific questions about the route or the project

• receive occasional behind-the-scenes posts

So I owe it to you to be honest. My idiosyncratic journey on foot from Brussels to Luxembourg is probably the only reason to walk 18.3 km from the railway station at La Hulpe to a bus stop called Ferme St Martin on a provincial road in Bousval. The account of skirting the eastern edge of the battlefield of Waterloo will be equally personal and unusual. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

I’ve planned this fourth stage carefully to stay on footpaths and through what seems like the emptiest bit of the map, furthest from the main roads south of Brussels. Today, I’m no longer in parks and forests as my route unrolls through woods, fields and villages. Paths make up 60% of the route. The roads – 33% – are mainly on my way out of La Hulpe. This is pleasant enough, part well-off Brussels suburb and part quirky 19th century town. It has antiques shops, narrow pathways between properties and a lake to walk past. Further on, any roads are mostly country lanes with negligible traffic.

I plan my routes to stay in nature and off the too well-beaten track. I’m helped in this by getting briefly lost amid the fancy properties of Rixensart. Already the trail has surprised me with how wealthy Belgium can look, and in La Hulpe I wonder at a van belonging to a supplier of “Mexican accessories for pets”. Today, however, will test my resolve to be different. I am approaching the battlefield of Waterloo, a cornerstone of English identity.

Already at the station, just seeing the name of La Hulpe takes me back to my English preparatory school, with its ancient wooden desks, linoleum floors and Horatio Hornblower books of Royal Navy men-o’-war battling the French. My father’s library also had many volumes on the Napoleonic era. The most striking to me was Erckman-Chatrian’s Waterloo (1865), which re-imagines the long marches, fears and furies of the war through the eyes of a French conscript clockmaker. And among the family papers in my attic, stuck into the back of an 1880s photo album, is The Times of London’s original report of the British commander the Duke of Wellington’s dispatch on the morning after his alliance’s great victory over Napoleon.

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There’s something else, too. As my siblings and I were sorting out my parents’ old house a few years back, we found a large book from 1816, carefully wrapped in thick brown paper and oddly forgotten between a bookcase and a wall. It showcased sketches and an account of a tour of Flanders and Holland by the English artist Robert Hills, and included unexpected angles on Waterloo.

Hills (1769-1844) turns out to be another of my English-Low Countries connections. He was a friend of my mother’s ancestors – he was even buried in one of their family graves in London – and a prolific artist. His exquisite watercolours, now brown with age, hang in every house of the extended family. Each one is a window onto pre-industrial country life. The Flanders sketches are in what would now be called a coffee-table book. The velvety paper and crispness of the black ink are still sumptuous, even if the binding is now disintegrating. A handwritten note on the flyleaf says ‘Author’s copy’. Because the book hasn’t been opened for several decades, the watercolour paint still looks fresh where an unknown hand has coloured in the engravings of some of Hills’ hallmark studies of ordinary people’s heads, wagons and animals.

Hills visits Waterloo just one month after the 18 June 1815 battle. Someone has put an early map of the action into the front of the book, likely the one Hills himself used. He starts out from Brussels, where nightly celebrations of the victory are still in progress. “Hardly a street was without a bonfire, or tub covered in candles and torches, round which a circle of twenty lads and lasses were dancing, saluting each other at intervals, and singing songs of exultation,” he wrote.

Remarkably, Brussels also bears “the aspect of one extensive hospital.” Thousands of soldiers wounded at Waterloo are lodged in hotels, homes and churches. The British and allied casualties were brought in first, but then the French are too. All are “treated with equal care and kindness … the convalescent [are seen] in groups through every street, and in the park, and at the theatres, with their slings, or bandaged heads, and stumps of amputated limbs.”

Outside Brussels, Hills sees an army camp, presumably British. It is “filled by hundreds of baggage and artillery wagons, portable forges, and other appendages to a great army, with their usual accompaniments of tents, soldiers’ wives, sentinels, drivers, farriers, pioneers, pots, pans, kettles, fires and cookery, displaying every variety of gypsy-like litter, dirt and picturesqueness.”

Hills heads south through the Sonian Forest. He is not as impressed as I am by the “thousands after thousands of tall, flimsy, upright beeches.” He’s an Englishman who prefers oak trees. On the skirts of the forest he sees “a quantity of fine timber” from the 25,000 oaks legendarily felled by Napoleon to build a fleet for his would-be invasion of England.

His day doing the battlefield sights sounds gruesome. There are mounds covering “enormous heaps of slain” soldiers, and hillocks for the officers who haven’t yet been dug up and taken home by grieving widows and families. He sees a hand sticking out of one shallow tomb. Foxes have tried to scratch out other corpses. Trees and hedges are ripped apart by the recent “deluge of fire”.

At the farmstead of La Haye Sainte, Hills’ carriage stops again. I can imagine why Wellington chose this as a front-line position. Most of the centuries-old Belgian farm buildings I pass by on the trail are impressively larger and more solidly built than I’ve ever seen elsewhere. Some look almost fortified. In Hills’ sketch, La Haye Sainte looks remarkably intact despite all the shelling. Inside he finds it littered with detritus from the chaos of battle. Or rather, what little is left, as locals pick over the fields for buckles, bullets and other saleable souvenirs.

“The straw yard,” Hills says, “was literally covered with wrecks of shoes, boots, foraging caps of various kinds, hats, cockades, knapsacks, canteens, oilskins, broken cartridge boxes, stocks of muskets, scabbards, gaiters, leaves of music, and other books, playing cards, leathern straps, rags that had staunched the blood of the wounded, and tatters every description, and the house the stables and piggeries were ruinously unfit for habitation.”

Planning my own route to the battlefield two centuries later, I see that many of the battle sites now abut built-up areas. Mont St Jean is right by the unsightly Brussels ring road. Google shows traffic driving past a grubby La Haye Sainte on the N5 highway. A proper visit to the battlefield means car parks, going round a museum, and lingering at a high memorial mound raised by Wellington’s Dutch allies and known as the Lion’s Mound.

I decide not to follow in Hills’ footsteps and to give chance its head. I’m beginning to sense which routes on the map will turn out the prettiest and deepest in nature. South of La Hulpe, earthen paths take me between trees and meadows with elegant horses nibbling at the spring grass. A Belgian church steeple leads me to the village of Ohain. I’m tempted by signposts to a couple of upmarket restaurants, a rarity along The Brux-to-Lux Trail. Today I have sandwiches and am alone with my dog Einstein, so I press on.

A narrow path between houses leads down to the marshy bed of the Lasne river, which in the streaming sunshine today is more of a stream. The valley is shallow. I can see how it would have swelled in the pouring rain of mid-June 1815. This is the muddy route through which Prussian troops struggled to reach the battlefield in response to the Duke of Wellington’s urgent appeals for help.

Over a small ridge, an arrow-straight path guarded by stout wooden fence posts takes me between two fields. Passing by a copse, I see an unexpected column among the trees and pause to take a look. It is a memorial to a Prussian cavalry colonel, Wilhelm, Graf von Schwerin. I look up the aristocratic officer’s story later. A soldier since the age of 13, he was wounded in the leg in Napoleon’s crushing of the Prussians at Iena-Auerstedt in 1806. He then joined the reformed Prussian staff for the campaign that defeated Napoleon’s France in 1813-14. Awarded the Iron Cross, first class, he was the officer chosen to take news to Berlin of the March 1814 capture of Paris.

Here on the eastern edge of Paris Wood in the afternoon of 18 June 1815, the 43-year-old von Schwerin was riding at the head of a Silesian regiment of Hussars. The Prussian armies were nearing the fighting that had been raging since the morning a few kilometres to the east. Then at 4pm, a French howitzer shell exploded right in front of the colonel. Shrapnel struck his head and he was probably the first Prussian to die in the Battle of Waterloo. His wife erected the memorial column of Belgian bluestone granite close to where he died, now sheltered by an oak.

“Fell in foreign parts in victory … for the homeland,” says a heavy inscription. The battle certainly propelled Prussia to the front rank of European powers, gave it dominance in German unification and tipped the Germans’ centre of balance westward against France. It also led, fifteen years later, to the creation of modern Belgium.

I press on into Paris Wood. It was from here that Napoleon met his Waterloo. He had thought that his success against the Prussians at the Battle of Ligny two days earlier had sent them retreating homeward to the east. Not so. If he would have been more aggressive and thorough in the preceding days, he would know the Prussians actually went north and were able to come to Wellington’s aid. The Prussians mustered on the field I am walking through and then attacked westward through the ancestors of these same trees. At that point Napoleon’s armies were fiercely testing the British centre. But instead of victory, he saw his lightly-guarded right flank steamrolled by the Prussians from the side. Even his best troops were forced to flee. As the Duke of Wellington wrote, the outcome was “the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life”.

I walk on to the village of Couture-Saint-Germain, low-built, white painted, cobblestoned and much as it must have been two centuries ago. It’s beautifully kept. As often on the walk, I have to look very carefully to find the turning from the high street onto the narrow path between two properties back into the woods. Soon I am on one of the deep, ancient tracks that early accounts call ‘defiles’ or ‘hollow roads’. I can see why they are a real chokepoint in the movements of armies, wagons and cannon.

I’m still barely half way through my day’s walk. After some thin woodland, the country opens up into the great wide fields that will be my horizons for the next stages. It’s bracing to see my way forward clearly for kilometres ahead. I especially love long paths under spreading branches along the edges of fields. I feel my pace lengthening and my spirit brightening.

One kilometre out from my end-point, the Ferme St Martin bus stop in Bousval, I drop my reluctance to look at anything except the map on my phone. I see that I will either make the bus to the railway station in Ottignies in ten minutes, or I will have to wait for an hour. My top speed walking is one kilometre every ten minutes and I don’t trust the bus not to be early. For the last 500 metres, Einstein and I just run.

You can download the GPX file for the La Hulpe-Bousval route for free here and or by navigating along this hiking route on my Brux-to-Lux Trail collection on Komoot, the hiking app.

If you’ve enjoyed a walk or a piece of writing, you’re very welcome to make a one-off contribution toward trains, maps, and time on the road.

Help me blaze new trails

If you’d like to offer closer support, you can also take out a paid subscription. Alongside the free material, subscribers can:

• submit specific questions about the route or the project

• receive occasional behind-the-scenes posts

• listen to audio recordings of each stage, read by the author

Starting out from Groenendaal railway station, the three-hour hike to La Hulpe seems short, so I first add in a loop for a kilometre through a tempting valley behind. There is a fine sweep of woods to walk through down to the bed of the Ijse river.

In fact, walkers who want a longer, 16 km walk can skip Groenendaal by combining this Stage #03 with Stage #02. That way the route starts at the Boitsfort (Bosvoorde in Flemish/Dutch) mansion of Alfred Solvay, and ends at that of his brother Ernest in La Hulpe. The two men were Belgium’s greatest industrialists in the late 19th century, when the country was a top European economic power. The two stages can be simply linked by forking right onto the Drive of the Crusades (Kruistochtendreef in Flemish/Dutch) after walking through the tunnel under Brussel’s ring road.

But this blog is about what I really walked and saw. To tell the truth, I did this route alongside my wife Jessica Lutz and our dog Einstein a month before the idea entered my head that I would walk all the way from Brussels to Luxembourg. Only then did I realise that this hike is a natural part of it.

After the extra loop down to the Ijse river, we return to Groenendaal station and turn south into the Foret des Soignes (Zoniënwoud). We turn west for a while along the Stone Bridges Drive (Steenbruggendreef), one of the many fine cobblestone roads that lead through the Belgian countryside. As often, this one is perfectly straight.

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The cobbles have a grounded, natural look, despite their off-putting nickname in Dutch of kinderkopjes (little heads of children). My seafaring Uncle John loved to tell how he shipped a hold full of these stones on his then home, a Dutch barge, when he needed ballast for a sailing trip from Holland across the North Sea to England. We are still hoping that the municipality will re-cobble the pavement outside our Brussels house in stones like these, so that we can look as good as our neighbouring streets.

It’s a clear, cold day in early February and the sun flashes off the polished surface of the stones. There are no leaves yet on the tall beech trees, so the light plays on the forest floor of winter moss and bright pale green of the first grass shoots of spring. As the hum from the Brussels ring road fades into the background, I feel like I am breaking free from the city’s gravitational field.

We turn south again onto the path called Drive of the Crusades. Belgium has a taste for keeping these now unfashionable names, but it reminds of my Stage #01 meditation on Godfrey of Bouillon, the knight from these parts who walked and rode to Jerusalem, conquered the city and became king. As we approach the Drève de la Meute (Meutendreef), a pair of horses canter along a bridleway, their riders elegantly poised in the saddle. The Brux-to-Lux Trail is to teach me that there are a great many horses in Belgium.

This is also the line where the trail crosses from Flanders into the region of Wallonia, which I will continue through until I reach the border of Luxembourg. The signs switch from Dutch to French.

Soon I’m at the edge of Domaine Solvay. This park of 227 hectares is what remains of the estate round Ernest Solvay’s former summer mansion. In the 1860s, he and his brother together invented, patented and marketed a new process for cheaply combining salt and limestone to produce sodium carbonate (soda) that is key to making glass, washing powder and more. Using much the same process, today’s Solvay company remains a leading global soda producer. Reading up about them later, I wonder what role their father played: he was a businessman with both stone quarries and a salt refinery.

The first curiosity along our route is an obelisk built in the late 1960s by Ernest-John Solvay, grandson of Ernest and the last of the family to live in the chateau. Ernest-John wanted it to be 36 metres tall, higher than the trees in his woods. On its top is a delicately posed, 16-flamed sun made of wrought iron. It is said that following a move from an east-facing bedroom to one looking west, Ernest-John erected the obelisk west of the house so that the flaming disk would reflect back to him the rays of dawn.

My trail then passes by a museum dedicated to the late Belgian artist Jean-Michel Folon. His signature pieces are smooth, poignant sculptures of people in hats and coats, often apparently outdoors. But his subjects don’t seem equipped for a long-distance trail. The closest Folon gets is his ‘ville en marche’ - the town walking - a kind of human-shaped skyscraper striding forth near Brussels’ Gare du Nord (Noordstation).

The elegant profile of Ernest Solvay’s mansion rises on the brow of a low hill. The Chateau de la Hulpe has more sculptures outside, including some scary dogs of war next to their god, Mars. Built for an earlier owner in 1842, some Belgian websites see in it an echo of Marlinspike (or Moulinsart in French), the ancestral hall of Captain Haddock, friend of Tintin, both early heroes of mine. The author Hergé did portray the mansion as being in Belgium, since the local gendarmerie wear Belgian uniforms. However, Hergé himself said the real model was the Château de Cheverny in France’s Loire valley, minus its two wings.

The property was made over to the Belgian state after Ernest-John’s death in 1972, and can now be hired for weddings, events and concerts. It has thus become part of the impressive philanthropic legacy of the Solvay family, who are responsible for two other parks in Brussels, one of the best houses designed by Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta, university institutes and more.

I just want refreshment, knowing that we have a dull half-hour walk to the station through suburban streets to reach La Hulpe railway station. This stage of the hike is 22% on roads and 78% on paths. That’s not a bad ratio, but I will gradually improve my ability to avoid asphalt as I plan further stages along the Brux-to-Lux Trail.

Just outside the gates of the estate, the pleasant Café Ernest is waiting for us. We sit under a large photo of the fifth Solvay conference, the influential, invitation-only scientific series initiated by Ernest Solvay that continues until today. At this one held in Brussels in 1927, Albert Einstein himself led critical debates that gave more shape to his new theory of quantum physics. Seventeen of the twenty-nine attendees in the black-and-white print won, or went on to win a Nobel prize.

Our daughter named our dog Einstein because she thought him, as a puppy, very clever at escaping from his enclosure. He later grew whiskers to match. I try to draw his attention to the picture, but our Einstein only really reacts to live people. Nor is he up for basking in the reflected glory of Belgium’s former industrial might. He’s too comfortable dozing on Jessica’s lap.

You can download the GPX file for the Boitsfort-Groenendaal route for free here and or by navigating along this hiking route on my Brux-to-Lux Trail collection on Komoot, the hiking app.

If you’ve enjoyed a walk or a piece of writing, you’re very welcome to make a one-off contribution toward trains, maps, and time on the road.

Help me blaze new trails

If you’d like to offer closer support, you can also take out a paid subscription. Alongside the free material, subscribers can:

• submit specific questions about the route or the project

• receive occasional behind-the-scenes posts

• listen to audio recordings of each stage, read by the author

A strange part about moving to Belgium is to feel how close it is to my country of origin, England. Walking round the country has been an excuse to relive a few direct links to my own family. It’s one more reason that I’m excited to set out for today’s stage #02 of The Brux-to-Lux Trail.

I’m starting from Boitsfort (Bosvoorde in Flemish), where stage #01 ended, and aiming for Groenendaal. First, though, I want to see if I can find the finishing school that my great aunt, Phyllis Garle, attended as a teenager around 1906. I know this from a postcard of the school building I found amid my mother’s family papers. It shows a striking Flemish gothic pile called the Chateau Charle-Albert.

I’ve tracked down an address for building online. The grand residence was even owned for a time by a Belgian ex-prime minister. But I can’t work out what exactly I’ll find after bomb damage in the Second World War, two fires, decades of dereliction and fights over reconstruction.

Aiming for the starting point, I mistakenly detrain one station too early. Contrary to my assumption, Watermael-Boitsfort (Watermaal-Bosvoorde) is not Boitsfort (Bosvoorde). I walk the additional couple of suburban kilometres to where the map says I should start looking for this great survivor.

Nobody in the family knows what “finishing” did for Great Aunt Phyl, who had previously done stints in boarding schools on England’s south coast. I have a couple of photos of a group of Edwardian teenage girls that might include her – tall and long-faced in the back row – and I’m hoping that seeing the chateau’s grounds might clarify if the image is really from here. I know people had to stand still and look serious in early photographs, but these girls look miserable, even angry.

There it is! The building gleams with new glory, even if the last bits of the renovation since 2014 are still under way. Nobody seems to be around, so I walk in through the freshly painted, black wrought-iron gates. The new residents are clearly going to be a mix of commercial and residential users, but the spirit of the building is being preserved. I poke around the grounds, looking for the photo’s ornamental balustrades. I find only traces of a small bridge, perhaps part of an ornamental walk.

It’s impressive to see, and fun to imagine Great Aunt Phyl skipping along these same paths. But I see none of the balustrades from the old picture. Perhaps renovation removed them. My great aunt never married and died when I was five, so I’m left with my hazy memories of what she was actually like and a favourite stuffed donkey she made for me on a voyage to South Africa. The letters, photographs and sketches produced during her lifetime of highly adventurous journeys – she traveled literally round the world, often alone – rarely included details about herself.

In any event, her real finishing school, apart from a spell at the Slade art school, seems to have been the First World War. She served first as a nurse and later as the driver for the chief of Britain’s female units working behind the British front lines of 1914-18 in northern France and the south of Belgium. At least the French she must have learned in Brussels came in useful.

Setting aside thoughts of Great Aunt Phyl, I set off to find the real start of today’s walk. It’s another make-believe castle next to Boitsfort (Bosvoorde) station. Here the wrought-iron gates are dominated by a big S for Alfred Solvay, brother of Ernest Solvay, leader one of Belgium’s family industrial-chemical conglomerates. After Alfred’s heirs died, it was targeted by the same post-Second World War developers and arson attacks as Chateau Charle-Albert and many other historic buildings in Brussels. The mansion was badly damaged and lucky to be rebuilt. Scaffolding once again shrouds the building as its pointy Flemish gothic flourishes get another facelift.

A walled vegetable garden

The grounds are now a modest public park, and my route twists round a picturesque lake and up through the Solvay family’s walled vegetable garden, which is unusual and looks impressively useful. The back gate opens onto a paved path that takes me under a big road south from Brussels and into the Fôret de Soignes (Zoniënwoud).

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Past the road, I step gratefully onto a beaten earth footpath. Full of good cheer, I greet a man sitting on a bench next to a big electric bicycle, then lean down to unleash my small dog Einstein so he can push freely forward. Immediately a French-speaking voice booms out like that of a primary school teacher. Surely, it tells me with patronising friendliness, I know that dogs cannot be let off the lead. So for the next kilometre, past lakes and trees beginning to sprout leaves, Einstein has to be kept in check until I can stop looking over my shoulder.

This walk is the shortest of The Brux-to-Lux Trail, at just 7.5 km, or five miles. The length is happenstance. Before I worked out that my walk should be from Brussels to Luxembourg, I’d already recently covered what became the third stage from Groenendaal to La Hulpe. The more energetic walker can easily combine this Stage #02 with the Stage #03 (12.3 km) or Stage #01 (11.4 km).

An ancient forest

The first couple of kilometres of the footpath follows the meandering of a mountain stream through a shallow, forested valley. It feels like deep countryside. I’m surprised at how a there is almost no tarmac or concrete along the way – indeed, Komoot tells me the route is 93% paths and 3% asphalt. Footpath tunnels lead under the two highways and I only have to physically cross one road on the whole stage. It is refreshing how little cars or even traffic noise disturb the walk.

Stage #02 is mostly through an ancient beech forest that is a UN World Heritage Site. The walk also takes me out of the Brussels region and into the few kilometres of Flanders that surrounds the south of the city. This Flemish belt is an odd piece of political geography left over from bitter territorial disputes between Dutch-speaking Flemings and French-speaking Walloons in the 1960s. Looking closely at a path-side map, I see that the UN has carefully extended its heritage site protection of the beeches to each of Belgium’s three federal regions: Brussels, Flanders, and Wallonia. Clearly, another Belgian political compromise.

Such frictions melt away in these age-old woods. As often happens, the Low Countries landscape makes up for its famous flatness with enormously tall trees. The majestic beeches here are a legacy of the end of the last ice age. As warmer temperatures began to creep up from southern Europe 12,000 years ago, a small band of beeches that survived in the south of France began advancing northward. As first movers, they became the dominant re-colonisers of the land that emerged from under the glaciers.

Spring is definitely in the air. Leaves have not yet grown on the trees, allowing the sun to play on the forest floor. This encourages shoots of spring grass and a carpet of little white wood anemones, a flower whose ephemeral presence is an indicator of ancient, undisturbed woodland. Winter storms have felled several trees. Few people are about. One couple park their bikes by a long fallen tree trunk and canoodle upon it with all the passion of the season.

Reading one of the names of the long, often straight paths through the Fôret de Soignes (Zoniënwoud), I suddenly realise that the Flemish/Dutch word they are known by – ‘dreef’ – is yet another of the many words that I mistakenly suppose to be the private property of the English language. The penny drops that ‘dreef’ is the same word the English use for the ‘drive’ up to the door of a house. Partly through the luck of having a Dutch wife, I have learned that at least half of our vocabulary is shared. People have been raiding, trading and parading across the English channel since prehistoric times, just like these trees.

After my Great Aunt Phyl returned to England, the First World War broke out and made Belgium its first victim. Phyl immediately trained as a nurse, before then becoming a driver. All her three brothers and sister (as a military cook) were sucked into the war, most of them passing in and out of Belgium. Phyl sent her mother another postcard with poignant pencil drawings of her youngest brother Gilbert as he recovered in hospital from a frontline shrapnel wound to the head. When the two sisters died, much later, they chose to lie in a cemetery in England’s New Forest under a thin wooden cross of the same design as was used for the combatants’ first graves during the First World War.

Anglo-Belgian ties

As I write these lines, ever more family links to the Low Countries keep popping into my head. In the winter of 1914, my great-grandfather made over his house in Kent to be the Belgian Red Cross hospital for Belgian refugees in that part of England. The daughter of a Dutchman from Amsterdam became my grandmother after she married Phyl’s brother; he took a souvenir stone carving from the ruins of the Cloth Hall in Ypres that now hangs on my garden wall in Brussels. And my father’s father was gassed and twice wounded in the terrible struggles around Hooge Chateau just outside Ypres in July 1915. Two of his cousins had already been killed nearby. Their bodies still lie in Flanders’ fields.

The Brux-to-Lux Trail won’t pass by the trenches of the 1914-18 war. I’m sure there are other routes for that. But such morbid thoughts have their place, despite the delightful spring weather. As I am soon to discover in later stages of my walk to Luxembourg, the country is haunted by the ghosts of many past battles and wars, most of them involving England. Not for nothing does the strapline of one of the country’s leading historical associations, the War Heritage Institute, put it simply: “Belgium: the battlefield of Europe.”

You can download the GPX file for the Boitsfort-Groenendaal route for free here and or by navigating along this hiking route on my Brux-to-Lux Trail collection on Komoot, the hiking app.

If you’ve enjoyed a walk or a piece of writing, you’re very welcome to make a one-off contribution toward trains, maps, and time on the road.

Help me blaze new trails

If you’d like to offer closer support, you can also take out a paid subscription. Alongside the free material, subscribers can:

• submit specific questions about the route or the project

• receive occasional behind-the-scenes posts

• listen to audio recordings of each stage, read by the author

I take the first steps of my journey among the selfie-snappers and gilded crenellations of the Grand Place in Brussels. I often walk about town, so I’m confident I’ve chosen a pleasant route for the inaugural stage of The Brux-to-Lux Trail. My eventual goal – reaching the Place d’Armes in Luxembourg on foot – feels a long way away.

Floating on thoughts of the 360 kilometres ahead, I don’t really notice anyone round us. Still, as I walk away from the ornate 17th century buildings of the Grand Place, I feel it’s a good omen that a talented saxophonist is regaling an audience in front of the Galeries Royale with an uplifting solo.

At my side is Einstein, my family’s small white mutt. He spends most of his life asleep on sofas, cushions and beds. He has no idea about the prodigious feat that I am about to ask of his short legs. Unlike the bourgeois bichons of Brussels, he currently looks very shaggy and in need of a haircut. But his sixth sense tells him the boss is in a good mood. He is happy to pull ahead, in pace with the spring in my step.

Oddly, this is not the first stage I’ve walked out of town. I had first assumed that wherever I was going, it was to be the Ardennes, and for that I needed to go east. So I walked three days in that direction. But studying the map, the countryside and the railway lines, I felt a growing preference for Luxembourg as the destination. I belatedly realised I would have to head due south. So for the purity of a Brux-to-Lux narrative arc, I actually need to start again.

My idea for these walks is to spend time deep in fields and forests, so this urban first stage feels like a bit of a duty. Still, I’ve planned the route carefully to catch as much greenery and beauty in Brussels as I can, just in case there’s anyone out there who wants to follow in my footsteps. Remarkably for a route through a European capital city, it’s on paths 82% of the way, and less than half of it is on paved tracks or asphalt.

Yesterday evening I pored over my old fold-out maps, guidebooks that rarely get opened any more and what tourist apps offer online. Today’s route doesn’t look particularly unique. But I tried hard and I’m sure I will find something of interest. Wandering about my home commune of Schaerbeek, I find lovely architectural details every day on the never-ending feast of façades.

Einstein and I head up the steps of the Mont des Arts (Kunstberg in Flemish/Dutch) under a clear blue sky and brilliant March sun. The 1930s, Art Deco feel of the area round Brussels central train station and the panoramic steps up to the Rue Royale (Koningsstraat) look suitably splendid. Over to the right is Bozar, the 1928 arts centre built in part over the site of the boarding school where Charlotte and Emily Brontë briefly studied. As we climb, a huge surrealist green apple appears on top of the Magritte Museum. The façade of interwoven metalwork lines on the former “Old England” department store reminds passers-by again that Brussels is the birthplace of Art Nouveau.

We arrive at the Place Royale (Koningsplein). I pause before the statue to the crusader knight Godfrey of Bouillon, in 1099 the first European king of Jerusalem. He only lasted a year on the throne, but his larger-than-life presence is a bold statement of the kind of empire-building entitlement that continues to plague the world. He would have been surprised to learn about his afterlife, reigning for two centuries and counting over one of Brussels’ most prominent squares.

Since Belgium only exists since 1830, the country’s 19th century nation builders chose Godfrey to represent their need for an early Belgian hero. That’s because some of his estates lie in what is now southern Belgium. The stone fortress associated with him, Bouillon, squats heavily on a ridge on a nearly complete oxbow in the River Semois near the French border. I wonder if I should put his castle on my still-undecided route.

After all, Godfrey, and those who rallied to the then Pope’s call for a “people’s crusade”, were long-distance travellers too. Godfrey and tens of thousands of others walked or rode horses 4,500 kilometres to Jerusalem through Europe and what is now Turkey. The crusade against Muslim rule was quite an operation. And whether or not Godfrey is the true first owner of the 11th century sword and stirrups still treasured by Christian monks in Jerusalem, he surely took a lot of ironwork with him.

I just have a compact haversack with two aluminium bottles of water, a couple of sandwiches and a bowl for Einstein, and I’m not sure I’m going to go as far as the Holy Land. I step lightly on, still wondering about what choosing Godfrey as a national symbol says about what it means to be a Belgian.

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After all, I am now a Belgian too. I’ve lived ten years in Brussels, one of the country’s three federal regions. The city is changing fast. Less than one quarter of its 1.3 million people are what the statistics agency calls “Belgian with a Belgian background”, that is, Dutch-speaking Flemish or French-speaking Walloon. 37% of the city’s population is foreign and many more have at least one foreign-born parent. There are dozens of languages and countries of origin on my home street. Indeed, Brussels ranks with Dubai and Queens, New York, as one of the most diverse, multinational places in the world.

As for me, I’m born of British parents in South Africa, I’ve lived half my life in Turkey, I’ve been been married to a Swiss and now a Dutch lady, and my three daughters have been schooled in the English, French, Canadian, German, Dutch and Flemish education systems. As an identity-challenged person, Brussels is definitely my place to be. But taking long walks in Wallonia and Flanders is already beginning to transform my appreciation of the rest of the country.

The year I became Belgian, I celebrated by wandering through the 21st July national day festival right here in the centre of town. I joined a throng behind a barricade who reached out to shake hands with the passing King and Queen, Philippe (Filip) and Mathilde. The royals looked a bit surprised at my determination to achieve this blessing from three rows back. Luckily, my arm is long. They graciously accepted my outstretched hand, and it made my day.

I’m skirting past their downtown Royal Palace now, mostly to take in the first real greenery of the trail in the lovely Parc de Bruxelles (Warandepark) in front of it. Here neo-classical statues with their toes strangely peeping out of their plinths look just the same as when it was first set up in the 18th century. In the summer festival here, modern knights on hearty horses re-enact a jousting tournament in the alley of plane trees facing the palace. Even if their lances are made of light balsa wood, the crashing and splintering is something that Godfrey might have enjoyed.

I continue round the palace garden wall, past an equestrian statue of King Leopold II, who reigned from 1864 to 1909. Its continued prominence is controversial, due to his appalling colonial record in the Congo. Belgium had one of the shortest colonial periods of any European state and felt the need to extract as much as rival powers in a fraction of the time. Another of his statues in Ostend had its hand cut off, marking anger about the same cruel punishment meted out to uncounted thousands of Congolese workers who did not harvest enough rubber or otherwise offended their Belgian overlords. Here, the worst I’ve seen happen to the brooding, long-bearded king is some protest paint. But there’s nearly always a pigeon perched on his head, with predictable results.

I cross the inner ring road to the Chausée d’Ixelles (Elsensesteenweg), jigging left so I can walk through the shops and restaurants of St Boniface (Sint-Bonifatius). It’s one of the more charming oases in Brussels. I’m sorry to see that restaurants and chains have taken over former icons like the second-hand hi-fi dealer who only dealt with customers at his door – through which his random piles of mid-20th century cassette decks, amplifiers and turntables seemed to be about to spill out onto the street – and the fancy camera shop where I hardly dared ask questions from the haughty staff. I then pass sunny terraces full of young café goers on my way to Flagey Square and the ponds of the Étangs d’Ixelles (Viijvers van Elsene).

To my left are gorgeous neo-classical Brussels town-houses, and to my right is a lake, willow trees and grass. The walk leads on to the grounds of De la Cambre (Terkameren) Abbey, where footpaths take me through a long oasis of unexpected beauty.

Leaving the Abbey gardens, I join Emile de Mot Avenue for the short distance up to Avenue Louise, joining it by the gilded head of Belgian Second World War pilot Jean de Selys-Longchamps. On 21 January 1943, this headstrong airman coolly flew his Royal Air Force Hawker Typhoon at house height up De Mot Avenue and machine-gunned the local headquarters of the German occupying force’s secret police, the Gestapo. The apartment block still stands opposite the bust at No. 453, Avenue Louise. Several secret policemen were killed, many more injured and the building was put out of action for weeks. De Selys-Longchamps even had the sangfroid to scatter little red-yellow-and-black Belgian flags out of his cockpit and over the city before heading back to his airfield in England. He was killed six months later after a mission to Ostend when his plane broke up on landing.

My far less dramatic route south keeps me in in the manicured vegetation of the central reservation until I reach the entrance of the Bois de la Cambre (Ter Kamerenbos). The park’s gateway is marked by two naked men fighting on horseback in a grandiose and totally improbable bronze statue from 1905. I can’t wait to reach the more grounded countryside.

The park is not quite rural yet. The lake has pedalos. Sunday strollers and troops of boy scouts and girl guides fill the sweeping pathways. I pass a chapel and a large group of upbeat walkers from a Christian seminary, the first hint of the country’s deep Catholic attachment that I will encounter all along the trail. The path soon leads me into the Forêt des Soignes (Zoniënwoud). This forest is a great green belt around the south of Brussels, but still close enough to the city to hear traffic and feel the presence of suburban houses. I pause on a bench by the rails of the old horse-racing track, but the rest of it has been turned into a golf club.

I’ve reached Boitsfort (Bosvoorde). It’s pretty but a bit spooky here. A last sweep of the path takes me past the small lakes of what’s called the Valley of the Drowned Children. I’ve done 12 kilometres and reaching the edge of town feels like it’s enough for a first stage. Boitsfort also gives a rich choice of trains, trams and buses to get easily back to base, until the sun comes out again for my next day out on the road.

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You can download the GPX file for the Brussels-Boitsfort route for free here and or by navigating along this hiking route on my Brux-to-Lux Trail collection on Komoot, the hiking app.

If you’ve enjoyed a walk or a piece of writing, you’re very welcome to make a one-off contribution toward trains, maps, and time on the road.

Help me blaze new trails

If you’d like to offer closer support, you can also take out a paid subscription. Alongside the free material, subscribers can:

• submit specific questions about the route or the project

• receive occasional behind-the-scenes posts

• listen to audio recordings of each stage, read by the author

I know when I started walking beyond Brussels. I’m not sure when it was that I fixed on my destination. Certainly, it was after I began the journey. But soon the paths just seemed to draw me on and on.

If a day now dawns with blue sky and sunshine, or if I hear the clank and whistle of a train on the tracks not far from my house, I feel a yearning for the countryside: muddy ways beside rippling streams, farm tracks by vast open fields, or silent footpaths through thick forests.

During my first decade of living in Brussels, I rarely felt the need to leave the city. One reason might be that I regularly run through the lovely Josephat Park near my home in Schaerbeek. It has its own earth track through a small valley that the Belgian writer and democracy pioneer David Van Reybrouck aptly calls “a miniature Ardennes.”

Otherwise, I often walk to where I need to go, or I pedal on the Villo city bikes, heavy iron donkeys that give good exercise. I once rode a Villo bike the whole way round Brussels, an experience so beset with concrete flyovers that it deterred me from going further. Similarly, the grey, decrepit highways stretching from Brussels to Belgium’s borders are no advertisement for getting to know the country better.

Instead, I satisfied my need for visual variety with the many moments of architectural beauty in the streets that make Brussels such a unique place to live. For an occasional wish to see bigger parks, the ones behind the Africa Museum in Tervuren, around the Atomium or in the Forêt des Soignes (Zoniënwoud) were all that I thought I needed.

So what propelled me to create and then follow a 360 km long trail?

Once, it’s true, I climbed Iran’s Mount Damavand, 5,600m above sea level. More usually, my long-distance walks take place only in my imagination. I fantasise about treks through the mountains of Switzerland. Or Austrian valleys. Or along the coastline of Cornwall. For two decades, I’ve had a house in Turkey right next to the Lycian Way, one of the world’s most beautiful long-distance trails, but until recently I rarely went on hikes even there. Life is busy. Walking any real distance takes time, preparation, and weather that’s not too hot, wet or cold.

In 2025, though, my stars’ alignment changed. I had more time on my hands and the flexibility to do whatever I wanted, whenever the fancy took me. Above all, like many people coming out of full-time employment, I felt the need to create a new sense of mission for myself.

Actually going somewhere

However, I didn’t want to go round neat short circuits, pretty or popular though such walks may be. A long walk that actually went somewhere, perhaps, might give me a goal to be getting on with. Something that I might look forward to with anticipation and look back on with a sense of achievement.

After taking a closer look at Belgium’s excellent network of local train and bus transport, I realised I could inexpensively get a long way from Brussels and back in a day. Done right, a chain of those day-long walks could add up to a real journey.

That way, too, I could choose to walk only when the weather was good.

The idea of trying to walk to a particular place happened like this. One fine day, I wondered if, instead of taking the No. 44 tram to the park in Tervuren just east of Brussels as usual, I could simply walk there. After a close and somewhat suspicious search for footpaths on Google Maps, I rode out to Hermann Dubroux station at the end of Metro Line No. 5, wandered a couple of hundred yards through a flea-market under a fly-over and turned onto the first footpath that I’d found.

It was like entering another world. I was on a beautiful path leading past streams, trees, meadows and a delightful old cloister complex called Le Clôtre Rouge (Roodklooster). I went on through the Forêt des Soignes (Zoniënwoud). I barely noticed the unsightly Brussels ring road, since I passed under it through a walkers’ tunnel. The rough, muddy glory of the Tervuren Arboretum came next, followed by long, straight paths through alleyways of elegant tall trees. Finally I crossed one road and passed through an ornate back gateway into the magnificent parklands around Tervuren’s Royal Museum of Central Africa.

Crossing that road was the only tarmac I saw all along the 15km hike. I had enjoyed an almost entirely car-free day. I was in heaven.

I did a couple more test routes that lived up to my new hopes: minimal traffic, maximum countryside, few hardened roads, plenty of forest paths and good transport back home.

Belgium’s footpath network

To go further, though, I needed something more than Google Maps. Thanks to the occasional Belgian country walk with my sister Helen, I was aware of the “points-noeud” (knooppunten) signpost system that directs walkers from numbered post to numbered post. Apparently, back in the days when Belgium was a mining superpower, such numbers were how miners found their way around in the dark underground. So someone decided to make them work above ground for the country’s modern superpower cyclists, and then walkers too.

I got serious. I subscribed for a while to the best Belgian app with all the numbers plotted on maps (wandelknooppunt.be). I soon realised it was based on an excellent global resource, OpenStreetMap. I could use the app to go anywhere I wanted to. I started laying out our old paper maps on the dining room table. I checked out the hiking websites of potential way-station towns. I cross-checked with Google’s satellite photos. I even used it to make myself walks while on holiday in far-away places.

But what should my destination be? Germany to the east seemed too vast and too vague. The Netherlands to the north too familiar and flat. France to the south ditto, at least anywhere nearby. I prefer hill country. I wanted to recreate the startlingly beautiful walks my wife Jessica and I stumbled on during a short break we took in Spa, in the eastern part of the Ardennes.

Luxembourg calling

That all seemed to point me southeast, toward Luxembourg. I admit that walking from the capital of the fifth smallest European state to that of the second smallest didn’t at first sound very grand or compelling. But perhaps that’s what got me. I’m a bit of a misfit, and I like nothing better than doing something nobody else can be bothered with.

So Luxembourg slowly grew on me, a mysterious, mediaeval principality that geography and geopolitics often forget, perhaps precisely because it doesn’t seem to be on the way to anywhere. (British television humour immortalised it thus). And, as I wanted to get back to my comfortable home in Brussels after each day stage, another tidbit of information was alluring: the line to Luxembourg, which opened way back in 1850s, has frequent stops. I didn’t know how much public transport I would have to take in Luxembourg, but it sounded nice that, once there, it would be absolutely free.

It was surprisingly hard to plan twenty one-day itineraries that matched my priorities: keeping a good distance away from roads with traffic, avoiding built-up areas, seeking out natural beauty, staying off any tarmac, taking in sites of touristic interest, keeping within 15 km-20 km per day and ending up at a convenient train station so I could get home.

Looking at the map more closely, I realised that heading for Luxembourg meant starting again. My trial stages were taking me too far east, away from convenient railway stations, villages and scenery that I wanted to visit, like the towns of Namur and Dinant, and rivers like the Sambre, Meuse (Maas) and Lesse.

My way-planning skills improved over time. Preparing the route became almost as satisfying as the walk itself. I added the hiking app Komoot to my phone, and became addicted to it. It wan’t just about knowing where I was going. I needed to have good options if I suddenly found a path turning into a road or bumped into a red sign warning that I was heading into private property.

Forests, farms and battlefields

I included wherever I could segments of the existing long-distance trails through southern Belgium. The path goes through great forests, along rivers, across battlefields and past centuries-old farms and castles. There is even the odd Roman road, a few steep climbs (to a heady maximum of 400 metres above sea level), and hundreds of crosses, hermitages, grand abbeys, religious schools, churches and chapels of all descriptions. Having previously seen rural Belgium mostly from its run-down highways, it was a revelation to see how lovely the countryside could be.

The Brux-to-Lux Trail is a unique interpretation of all these things. It prioritises landscape over speed, wandering for 360 km instead taking the direct 180 km that a crow would fly. It avoids asphalt nearly four-fifths of the way. Any roads are almost all quiet country lanes. And the overall climb of 5,600m is the equivalent of conquering Mount Damavand from sea level – and coming back down again.

I hope you will enjoy trying it out.

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I share the route maps, GPX files, and basic technical information for these walks freely here on Substack. You can also follow the routes on my Brux-to-Lux Trail collection on Komoot.

If you’ve enjoyed a walk or a piece of writing, you’re very welcome to make a one-off contribution toward trains, maps, and time on the road.

Help me blaze new trails

If you’d like to offer closer support, you can also take out a paid subscription. Alongside the free material, subscribers can:

• submit specific questions about the route or the project

• receive occasional behind-the-scenes posts

• listen to audio recordings of each stage, read by the author

Most pre-planned one-day hikes offer short circuits round nature reserves, villages or small towns. They often need a car to get there and back efficiently. On the other hand, the more exciting, national long-distance trails can only be done if you have lots of time, take risks with the weather, love camping and carry most of what you need.

I want to mix this up and share the result. My favourite kind of walks last just one day, but have a longer-term goal that offers a sense of purpose and motivation. At the same time, they are flexible and avoid any need to commit a big block of time. They go from point to point, pass through deep countryside and have as much variety as possible.

The Brux-to-Lux Trail

My first long-distance route is ambitious: The Brux-to-Lux Trail, a set of 20 one-day stages that will take you 360 km (225 miles) from the Grand Place in Brussels to the Place d’Armes in Luxembourg. I created and tested the route in 2025.

Like my other walks, each stage is as green and natural as possible, avoiding roads, traffic, noise and suburban clutter. I always prefer hiking paths, forest tracks and unpaved farm lanes, even if they are not the most direct route.

I try to keep each day’s stage to a reasonable length, requiring only average fitness and no technical expertise. You also need to carry nothing more than a light backpack, not heavy rucksacks or camping equipment.

None of the stages have to be done on consecutive days, thereby avoiding problems with stiffness or blisters. This also allows you to do a walk at short notice when the sun comes out, or simply cancel if the weather suddenly turns bad.

Above all, the route allows you to get home comfortably each night by public transport. I’ve become a big fan of Belgian Railways, and the regional bus networks are remarkable too. So travel to the starting point and back from the end point does not need a car and requires only economical day return tickets.

The distance you travel each day depends on your levels of energy and fitness. I did it in stages that ranged from 7km to 38km, but the shorter stages closer to Brussels can be combined to go longer and the three longer ones towards the Luxembourg end can be split in two. The stages can of course be done in any order. For each day, clear options and suggestions are provided.

Of course, these long-distance trails in one-day stages can be easily followed by anyone wanting to camp. You can also drive to the starting point and take a local train back to your car. Such trails are also good for those coming from further afield, since day stages end in places with stations that are convenient for hotels and restaurants.

Each stage is written up in a lively, guidebook-like style on Substack. Initially, I’ll be posting once a week on a Wednesday. I aim to give you a good feel for what to expect on each day out – Belgium is a surprisingly varied country – and where I can, I will act as an informal guide to local and Belgian history.

My first post describes how I got into all this. Then the first hike of the Brux-to-Lux Trail gets under way. Other long-distance trails from Brussels and perhaps elsewhere will follow, all of which can be done as one-day walks.

I share the route maps, GPS files, and basic technical information for these walks freely here on Substack. You can also follow the routes on my Brux-to-Lux Trail collection on Komoot.

If you’ve enjoyed a walk or a piece of writing, you’re very welcome to make a one-off contribution toward trains, maps, and time on the road.

Help me blaze new trails

If you’d like to offer closer support, you can also take out a paid subscription. Alongside the free material, subscribers can:

• submit specific questions about the route or the project

• receive occasional behind-the-scenes posts

• listen to audio recordings of each stage, read by the author