Chimay’s Trappists
The Trappist monks of the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance live outside Chimay in the Abbaye Notre-Dame de Scourmont, an architecturally dull complex dating from the 1850s near the French border, about 10km out of town. The monastery itself is out of bounds, but you can wander the grounds and visit the church, though frankly this is not exactly riveting stuff. The Trappists no longer brew beer at the abbey – the modern brewery is some way away and is also closed to the public – but you can sample their beers and cheeses at the nearby L’Auberge de Poteaupré, a restaurant-brasserie and shop in a converted school about 500m from the abbey on the main road (t060 21 14 33, wwww.chimay.com).
The Ducasse
Just along the rail line from Attre, Ath is a run-of-the-mill industrial town that boasts a major claim to fame in its festival, the Ducasse, held on the fourth weekend in August and featuring the “Parade of the Giants”, in which massive models, representing both folkloric and biblical figures, waggle their way round the town. If you’re in the area around this time, don’t miss it.
Mons and around
About forty minutes by train from Tournai, MONS may be familiar for its military associations. It was the site of battles that for Britain marked the beginning and end of World War I, and in 1944 the location of the first big American victory on Belgian soil in the liberation campaign. It has also been a key military base since 1967, when Charles de Gaulle expelled NATO – including SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe) – from Paris; SHAPE subsequently moved to Maisières, just outside Mons. Both continue to provide employment for hundreds of Americans and other NATO nationals – something which gives the town a bustling, cosmopolitan feel for somewhere so small. It’s a pleasant place, with a good café society, spread over the hill that gave it its name.
Railways and roads radiate out from Mons in all directions, putting central Hainaut’s key attractions within easy reach and making for several enjoyable day-trips; what’s more, using Mons as a base avoids the difficulty of finding somewhere to stay – accommodation is thin on the ground hereabouts. The Borinage, a former coalfield southwest of the town, holds the most obvious sights: the Vincent van Gogh house and the former colliery complex of Grand-Hornu, which is given an extra edge by the addition of the Musée des Arts Contemporains (MAC’s). Elsewhere, to the northwest, lie two very visitable châteaux – imposing Beloeil, with its extensive grounds, and the enticing Château d’Attre, while to the east Binche boasts one of Belgium’s most famous carnivals.
The Doudou
Every year, in late May or early June on the weekend before Trinity Sunday, Mons hosts the festival of the Doudou. Events kick off with a solemn ceremony on the Saturday, when the reliquary holding the remains of St Waudru is given to the city’s mayor. Locals flock into the Collegiate Church to sing their version of the Doudou folk song, which will continue for the rest of the week. On Sunday morning, the reliquary is processed around the town in a golden carriage – the Car d’Or – accompanied by a thousand-odd costumed participants, with everyone joining in to push the carriage back up the hill to the church with one huge shove: failure to get it there in one go will bring bad luck to one and all.
After the relics are safely back in the church, chaos erupts on the Grand-Place, with a battle between St George and the Dragon, known here as “Lumeçon”. St George and his thirty-eight helpers (all good men and true) slug it out with the dragon and his entourage (devils, the “Wild Men in the woods” and the “Men in White”). The crowd helps St George by pulling ribbons off the dragon’s tail as it whips through the air just above their heads, and inevitably, George and crew emerge victorious.
North of Mons: Château d’Attre
Completed in 1752, the elegant, Neoclassical Château d’Attre (t068 45 44 60), just to the northeast of Beloeil, was built on the site of a distinctly less comfortable medieval fortress on the orders of the count of Gomegnies, chamberlain to emperor Joseph II. It soon became a favourite haunt of the ruling Habsburg elite – especially the archduchess Marie-Christine of Austria, the governor of the Southern Netherlands. The original, carefully selected furnishings and decoration have survived pretty much intact, providing an insight into the tastes of the time – from the sphinxes framing the doorway and the silk wrappings of the Chinese room through to the extravagant parquet floors, the ornate moulded plasterwork and the archducal room hung with the first hand-painted wallpaper ever to be imported into the country, in about 1760. There are also first-rate silver, ivory and porcelain pieces, as well as paintings by Frans Snyders, a friend of Rubens, and the Frenchman Jean-Antoine Watteau, whose romantic, idealized canvases epitomized early eighteenth-century aristocratic predilections. Neither is the castle simply a display case: it’s well cared for and has a lived-in, human feel, in part created by the arrangements of freshly picked flowers chosen to enhance the character of each room. The surrounding park straddles the River Dendre and holds several curiosities, notably a 24m-high artificial rock with subterranean corridors and a chalet-cum-hunting lodge on top – all to tickle the fancy of the archduchess. The ruins of a tenth-century tower, also in the park, must have pleased her risqué sensibilities too; it was reputed to have been the hideaway of a local villain, a certain Vignon who, disguised as a monk, robbed and ravished passing travellers.
Northwest of Mons: Beloeil
Roughly halfway between Mons and Tournai, the château of BELOEIL (t069 68 94 26) broods over the village that bears its name, its long brick and stone facades redolent of the enormous wealth and power of the Ligne family, regional bigwigs since the fourteenth century. This aristocratic clan began by strengthening the medieval fortress built here by their predecessors, subsequently turning it into a commodious moated castle that was later remodelled and refined on several occasions. The wings of the present structure date from the late seventeenth century, while the main body, though broadly compatible, was in fact rebuilt after a fire in 1900. Without question a stately building, it has a gloomy, rather despondent air – and the interior, though lavish enough, oozing with tapestries, paintings and furniture, is simply the collected indulgences – and endless portraits – of various generations of Lignes. Despite all this grandeur, only one member of the family cuts much historical ice. This is Charles Joseph (1735–1814), a diplomat, author and field marshal in the Austrian army, whose pithy comments were much admired by his fellow aristocrats: most famously, he suggested that the Congress of Vienna of 1814 “danse mais ne marche pas”. Several of Beloeil’s rooms contain paintings of Charles’ life and times and there’s also a small selection of his personal effects, including the malachite clock given to him by the Tsar of Russia. Otherwise, the best parts are the library, which contains twenty thousand volumes, many ancient and beautifully bound, and the eighteenth-century formal gardens, the largest in the country, whose lakes and flower beds stretch away from the house to a symmetrical design by Parisian architect and decorator Jean-Michel Chevotet.
Southwest of Mons: the Borinage
The region immediately southwest of Mons is known as the Borinage, a poor, densely populated working-class area that, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, was one of Belgium’s three main coalfields, an ugly jigsaw of slag heaps and mining villages. The mining is finished, but the cramped terraced housing remains, a postindustrial sprawl that extends toward the French frontier. There are, however, a couple of attractions that may tempt you out here, specifically a house that was once lived in by the painter Vincent van Gogh, and the Grand Hornu, a very real remnant of the region’s industrial past.
Grand-Hornu
Between 1810 and 1830, in the village of HORNU, the French industrialist Henri De Gorge set about building the large complex of offices, stables, workshops, foundries and furnaces that comprises Grand-Hornu (wwww.grand-hornu.be). De Gorge owned several collieries in the area, so the complex made economic sense, but he went much further, choosing to build in an elegant version of Neoclassical style and constructing more-than-adequate workers’ houses just outside which survive to this day. This progressiveness did not necessarily win the affection of the workers – in 1830 the miners came within an inch of lynching him during an industrial dispute over wages – but De Gorge’s mines, as well as Grand-Hornu, remained in operation until 1954. Thereafter, the complex fell into disrepair, but it was revived in the 1990s and, with its large elliptical courtyard and ruined workshops, it’s a compelling slice of nineteenth-century industrial history. Furthermore, the old office buildings on one side now hold the Musée des Arts Contemporain (MAC’s; wwww.mac-s.be), which has already established a regional reputation for the quality of its temporary exhibitions of contemporary art. There’s a bookshop and café, and a nice restaurant too, overlooking the large courtyard. To get to Grand-Hornu, take bus #7 or #9 from Mons train station (every 15min) and alight at place Verte, from where it’s a five-minute walk.
Tournai
For many, TOURNAI is Wallonia’s most interesting and enjoyable town, its ancient centre latticed by narrow cobbled streets and straddling the sluggish, canalized River Escaut (Scheldt in Dutch). Its pride and joy is its magnificent medieval cathedral, a seminal construction whose stirring amalgamation of Romanesque and early Gothic styles influenced the design of other churches far and wide. Most visitors zero in on the cathedral to the expense of everything else, but the town centre also holds lots of handsome eighteenth-century mansions in the French style – stately structures with double doors, stone lower and brick upper storeys, overhanging eaves, elongated chimneys and, often as not, fancy balconies and a central (horse-carriage) courtyard. Add to this several excellent restaurants, and the town’s proximity to the extravagant châteaux of Beloeil and Attre, and you’ve reason enough to stay a night or two, especially as tourism here remains distinctly low-key, with barely a tour bus in sight.
The city was founded by the Romans as a staging post on the trade route between Cologne and the coast of France. Later, it produced the French monarchy in the form of the Merovingians, a dynasty of Frankish kings who chose the place as their capital – Clovis, the most illustrious of the line, was born here in 465. It remained under French control for a large part of its subsequent history, and stayed loyal to its king during the Hundred Years’ War. Indeed, the constancy of its citizens was legendary: Joan of Arc addressed them in a letter as “kind, loyal Frenchmen”, and they returned the compliment by sending her a bag of gold. Incorporated into the Habsburg Netherlands in the 1520s, Tournai was retaken by Louis XIV in 1667, and although this period of French control only lasted fifty years or so, Louis left his mark on the town with the heavyweight stone quays that still flank the river, and in scores of handsome mansions. Sadly, much of central Tournai was damaged by German bombing at the beginning of World War II, but enough has survived to reward a thorough exploration.
The Cathédrale Notre-Dame
Dominating the skyline with its distinctive five towers is Tournai’s Romanesque/early Gothic Cathédrale Notre-Dame, built with the wealth of the flourishing wool and stone trades. Its mammoth proportions in combination with the local slate-coloured marble were much admired by contemporaries and the design was imitated all along the Escaut valley. The present cathedral is the third church on this site, most of it completed in the latter half of the twelfth century, although the choir was reconstructed in the middle of the thirteenth. It’s a bit of building site at the moment, and likely to be so for some time, having been damaged by storms in the late 1990s, but you should inspect the west facade, on place de l’Evêché, with its three tiers of sculptures filling out the back of the medieval portico, before entering the church either here or by the main entrance on the south side. Inside, the nave is part of the original structure, erected in 1171, as are the intricately carved capitals that distinguish the lowest set of columns, but the vaulted roof is eighteenth-century. The choir was the first manifestation of the Gothic style in Belgium, and its too-slender pillars had to be reinforced later at the base: the whole choir still leans slightly to one side due to the unstable soil beneath. In front of the choir, the Renaissance rood screen is a flamboyant marble extravaganza by Cornelis Floris, embellished by biblical events such as Jonah being swallowed by the whale.
The ample and majestic late twelfth-century transepts are the cathedral’s most impressive – and most beautiful – feature. Apsed and aisled to a very unusual plan, they impart a lovely diffuse light through their many windows, some of which (in the south transept) hold superb sixteenth-century stained glass depicting semi-mythical scenes from far back in Tournai’s history. Opposite, in the north transept, is an intriguing twelfth-century mural, a pockmarked cartoon strip relating the story of St Margaret, a shepherdess martyred on the orders of the Emperor Diocletian. Its characters are set against an exquisite blue background reminiscent of – and clearly influenced by – Byzantine church paintings. Take a look, too, at Rubens’ characteristically bold The Deliverance of Souls from Purgatory, which hangs, newly restored, beside the adjacent chapel.
Be sure also to see the trésor, whose three rooms kick off with a splendid wood-panelled, eighteenth-century meeting room and a chapel hung with a rare example of a medieval Arras tapestry, made up of fourteen panels depicting the lives of St Piat and of St Eleuthère, the first bishop of Tournai. Next door, have a look at the silver and gilded copper châsse de Notre-Dame, completed in 1205 by Nicolas de Verdun and festooned with relief figures clothed in fluidly carved robes, and a wonderful early sixteenth-century Ecce Homo by Quentin Matsys, showing Christ surrounded by monstrous faces. The treasury also once hosted a gem-studded Byzantine Cross, which was stolen in a high-profile armed raid a couple of years ago – hence the current heightened sense of security.
