I have a project. There are many published walks and guides to our Forest. One is La forêt de Soignes, Sous les feuilles, l’histoire by Isabelle Douillet-De Pange and Alain Robyns, available in English too.
Armed with copies of René Stevens’ maps from just over a hundred years ago, I shall walk these routes again, but through his maps, his perceptions, his eye for detail.
Le Vallon Notre-Dame et les Petites Flosses. Our Lady’s valley and the little ponds. I left the church by the forme and returned by the latter, not completing the whole walk in the book, but going far enough before rain and hail threatened.
George Eliot wrote The Mill on the Floss. It is an ancient water-word, almost onomatopoeic, and it sits comfortably with gurgle and passage.
Over the next few days I will chronicle this foreshortened route and speak of what I noticed in this barren, pre-spring waiting of the year.
Now, back to the church.
Sander Pierron, in his Histoire de la Forêt de Soignes, 1905, tells us that in 1632 a Brussel’s merchant, Peeter Vanden Kerckhove, bought a statuette of the Virgin with the intention of placing it along the Overijse road near an old oak. Protection was needed for the travellers through the wild, wild wood.
He kept it at home for two or three years before it was finally installed. Soon after, seven soldiers followed another merchant who had stopped to leave an offering at the image. One of them stole the gift. When they attempted to leave, they found they could not move. Man and horse alike were held fast until the stolen object was returned.
The legend continues that as the oak grew it absorbed the statuette into its heart, much as old way signs are today slowly subsumed into the beech trunks of the Forest.
In 1650 the first stone was laid and the church began to rise.
If you wish to visit, it is open only at ten o’clock on Sunday for service. I still have not been inside. It is said to be lovely.