If you follow the Langestaartdreef/Drève de la Longue Queue from the Chapelle de Saint-Cornelius at Groenendaal rising up towards the old racecourse, there’s a stretch of forest road that looks rather battered and uneven. At first glance it seems like a simple cobbled track, but look a little closer and the story becomes more interesting.
These aren’t the neat, squared têtes de Napoléon cobbles that surfaced so many Belgian roads from the nineteenth century onwards. Those were quarried and split precisely, often from the great porphyry quarries like Quenast, giving that tidy, squared finish we all recognise. What you’re stepping on here is an older idea entirely and it isn’t that pleasant to walk on.
These stones were laid long before the age of tidy industrial cobbles. They’re roughly hewn, elongated along the direction of travel, and set down to give grip to horses and heavy timber carts moving up and down the slope. In other words, this was practical forestry engineering. No aesthetic intention, just traction, drainage, and the need to haul oak and beech trunks away from the forest. This path now temporarily finishes at the racecourse, but it was once a long trail, from near the present-day sculpture on the Chaussée de la Hulpe all the way to the former château of La Longue Queue just by the present day domain of the Château de la Hulpe.
More about this track in a future post.
You can still see the ruts worn by centuries of wheels and water. Soil and beech leaves have slowly filled the gaps, and moss has claimed the quieter corners, but the shape of the track is still readable. The stones are like the ancestors of those later Napoleonic-style cobbles: same geological territory, but a different era and a different purpose.
If you continue upward toward the old Renbaan, you are literally climbing a working road of the forest’s past. Every ridge and hollow is a reminder that this landscape was not only walked and worshipped, but worked, pulled, dragged, and rolled. All that, still visible beneath a thin skin of leaves.