The very names of things, how should we doubt them?
One path in a particularly interesting part of the Forest, not far from me, is now called Proefteeltenweg. The post carries only the Flemish name, as we find ourselves just over the regional border in Hoeilaart.
The first two maps are by René Stevens (1858–1937), a founder member of Les Amis de la Forêt de Soignes, as well as a writer and artist. His detailed maps of the Forest are an inventory, recording the names of paths and drives, landmarks, natural features, and topography. If René said something was there, then it was.
There are three maps below. The first, the more folkloric-looking one from around 1908, shows the path as Chemin des Palissades. Above it is written Dernières coupes à blanc étoc.
Up to this point, it was standard forestry practice to cut everything in a parcel of land back to white stumps and then replant. But people were now visiting the Forest more and more for recreational and aesthetic reasons. The naturalistic, arboreal world of the Fontainebleau School in France formed part of Stevens’ outlook, and there was a rising wave of influential public opinion that the Forest should no longer be treated as an open-cast mine of timber. In 1911, legislation was passed to curb this exploitation, though the scars remained, weeping sores on the forest floor.
Walk along the path today and, near the intersection with the Schone Eikweg, look up the slope. There stand Sequoia and Thuja related species, conspicuous, experimental, and not native, framed by the skyline.
The second Stevens map is from 1917, and in format it has changed tone and with no more hand fonts and a cohesive colour scheme it has become formal, official. And the name has changed. It is now the Chemin des Expériences, the former name has moved to a new path, pas loins.
When does the literal English translation ever help? Expériences here means experiments, in the strict forestry sense. The path now marks a place of experimental planting, a search for fast-growing foreign timber to fuel and shape an expanding city.
The third map, an OpenStreetMap, shows the name as it is now, but there are no more experimental plantings. No new non-natives, no more plans for exploitation. Instead, the trials are being gradually undone and the timber once prized for its price is giving way to native woodland, valued for what it sustains.