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Meanwhile back at Bois de l'Abbaye, the fishermen were having a Sunday fishing competition, 20 in front of Waterdog and 20 behind. If the canal ended up in disrepair they might lose their playground as well. Just substitute this idyllic scene for the image of the drained canal with trees and bushes growing out of it.
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Escapees; two horses eating their way down a towpath having escaped from their field. The farm hand came and collected them later and they seemed happy to follow close behind him as he led them back to the field. |
Cruising along with Tilly sniffing the country air as we went; she is tied on of course. These are the last photographs of her as a scraggy blond dog. She had a spring haircut (care of Chez Lorna) and now shows off her new, predominently ginger, coat (another health improvement, courtesy of the thyroxine supplements). |
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After the rally, Lawrence had to go to work, so we took Waterdog to Landrecies, still a few days cruising from our base in Belgium. We ended up staying there for 4 weeks, 2 for Lawrence to work plus 2 weeks to explore. Having the car meant we could check out a whole new area, including the pretty town of Le Quesnoy, with its well-preserved fortifications.
Landrecies in May 2012 with a single live-aboard barge; but in 1876 Robert Louis Stevenson described a very different, busy, vibrant canal:
'Long lines of barges lay one after another along the canal; many of them looking mighty spruce and shipshape in their jerkin of Archangel tar, picked out with white and green. Some carried gay iron railings, and quite a parterre of flower-pots. Children played on the decks, as heedless of the rain as if they had been brought up on Loch Carron side; men fished over the gunwale, some of them under umbrellas; women did their washing; and every barge boasted its mongrel cur by way of watch-dog. Each one barked furiously at the canoes, running alongside until he had got to the end of his own ship, and so passing on the word to the dog aboard the next. We must have seen something like a hundred of these embarkations in the course of that day's paddle, ranged one after another like the houses in a street'
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