A Surfeit of Boat Lifts and Castles

Wednesday 13 – Sunday 17 April 2022

We started off on Wednesday by visiting the Strépy-Thieu Boat Lift on the Canal du Centre. This is the biggest boat lift in Europe, opened in 2002.

It comprises two separate boat lifts, one on each side of the building, lifting/lowering barges a vertical distance of 73.15 metres on the Canal du Centre.

We visited the museum on the 8th floor (€8 each). It’s only small, basically a corridor of information and then a film. It was interesting, though, charting the history of canal transport in Belgium from the 19th century right up to the present day. We spent a couple of hours in there.

We could look down on the winding mechanism from the 8th floor:

Then, later on, we watched outside as a barge came down in the lift. Here’s Mark watching the concrete counterweights go up as the lift comes down:

The Strépy-Thieu lift was built as part of the modernisation of Belgium’s canals to allow for a larger 1350 tonne standard barge (a law relating to this was passed in the 1950s, so the modernisation has taken some time).

Prior to the modernisation, there were 4 boat lifts on this part of the Canal du Centre, each of which lifted barges 15-16 metres. The old lifts are still there; a new bit of canal was cut for the Strépy-Thieu lift, leaving the old bit of canal nearby pretty much redundant (though still used by pleasure craft).

The construction of the 13 mile long Canal du Centre started in 1888, with Lift Number 1 (above) opened in June of that year. The choice of a hydraulic boat lift rather than locks was inspired by the Anderton Boat Lift in Cheshire (which had opened in 1875). They even got the same designer in, Edwin Clark.

Lift Number 1 was used for research and for tourism purposes for quite a few years until the rest of the canal was completed and the remaining three lifts installed in 1917.

We walked from the Strépy-Thieu lift in one direction, seeing lifts 3 and 2 (which are close together), and then number 1 (an 8.6 mile round trip back to SOK) then drove the short distance in the opposite direction to lift 4 as time was getting on.

Lift 3:

Lift 3 was good. We walked up the steps at the side of the lift to find a boat about to descend. Mark got me to ask the chap manning the boat lift if boats had to pay to use it. The answer was no; it’s free in the region of Wallonia. He then pointed out that if we went back down and went into the red brick building in the photo above, we could have a look at the machine room. Great!

Lift 2 was very similar….

as was Lift 4….

After a busy day, we continued in a vaguely southerly direction to the motorhome aire at Cerfontaine near to the Lacs de l’Eau d’Heure (a group of 5 artificial lakes that seem popular with tourists and water sports enthusiasts):

Overnight: Cerfontaine (13 April):

It was a bargain at €10 for the night (including electricity) then €2 for water. It IS surrounded by a rather scruffy looking static caravan site, though, only separated from the aire on one side by a wire mesh fence. We chose a spot on the opposite side to avoid any possibly noisy neighbours.

Thursday’s destination was Dinant. We parked in the free parking for the citadel at the top of the hill.

Visiting cost €11 each including a ride on the cable car down to the town and back.

We got plenty of information about the history of the citadel with a particular focus on August 1914. The Germans took Dinant on 23 August. With the excuse that the town was full of Belgian snipers, they massacred 674 civilians then burned down two thirds of the buildings in the town that night.

Down in the town, we found a statue to a young Charles de Gaulle, injured in the fighting at Dinant on 15 August 1915:

Dinant is also famous as the birthplace of Adolphe Sax, an inventor of many things including the saxophone, which he patented in 1846. We found the man himself sitting on a bench, and the town itself is full of giant saxophones:

About half an hour from Dinant, still on the river Meuse, is the town of Givet. This is actually in France, part of a small finger of land that protrudes into Belgium. Oddly, there don’t seem to be any roads linking Givet to the rest of France without passing back through Belgium?

Overnight: Givet (14, 15 April)

The new free motorhome aire right by the river was very popular: we got the last of the spaces in the “front row”:

Givet: so good we stayed there twice! As the weather had by now perked up from the cold and wet weather we’d had at the start of the trip and become decidedly summery, we decided to award ourselves a day of rest to enjoy the sunshine and have a look round Givet.

We headed out for a 5 mile jog along the river in the morning, spotting a European pond turtle sunning itself on a log and a kingfisher along the way.

In the afternoon, we had a wander around the town. Unfortunately, the Citadel on the hill above Givet is closed until June, so we’ll have to have a look at that some other time.

Saturday’s destination was about an hour further South but back in Belgium. The tiny town of Bouillon lies in a meander of the River Semois:

There isn’t a huge amount there, but it’s a nice compact little tourist destination with a castle perched up high in the middle and bars/restaurants stretched out along the riverside.

We really liked Bouillon Castle (€11 each; not sure how that happened as this year’s literature says €15?). It’s full of little passageways, tight winding staircases and the like. The signage (numbers on the wall to help you follow the route) did the job but that side of things would benefit from some modernisation.

The most famous person / story associated with the castle is Godefroid (Godfrey) de Bouillon. Godfrey sold all of his possessions (including the castle at Bouillon) to the Prince-Bishop of Liège in 1095 in order to raise funds for his participation in the first Crusade.

Godfrey led one of the principal armies involved in the crusade and, after the capture of Jerusalem, was elected first King of Jerusalem by his fellow crusading knights. He turned it down on the basis that he couldn’t possibly wear a crown of gold in the place where Jesus Christ had worn one of thorns, instead taking on the responsibilities of the job but with a lesser title.

We got a great view from the castle of the town on one side and, on the other, the motorhome aire behind the football fields.

Bouillon has come up with the initiative of offering a “City Pass” rather than just tickets to the castle. This enables you to visit two other attractions you otherwise might not want to pay to see: the town museum (which had a few interesting things in it but was a bit of a hotch-potch) and an old audiovisual presentation about Godfrey de Bouillon above the tourist office. This was twenty years old and showing its age…. Adding these bits and pieces to the ticket for the castle makes sense. The best free “extra” we got was probably the short falconry display at the castle:

Overnight: Bouillon (16 April)

The free aire at Bouillon was absolutely packed full of vans (it’s big; the photo only shows our small part of it) but surprisingly, we had a remarkably quiet night:

We visited our last castle of the week on Sunday. Phew!

Just back across the border into France, Sedan Castle (€8.50 each, reduced from €10.50 as a part of the museum was closed for works) bills itself as the largest in Europe. We were quite interested in this claim as we were both sure that we’d been told that Malbork Castle was the biggest when we visited Poland in 2017.

Basically, we’ve come to the conclusion that the marketing folk at Sedan are telling porky pies. The castle covers an area of 35,000 square metres. We hit the internet for some comparisons. That’s a tad smaller than Edinburgh Castle (35,737 square metres) and much smaller than, say, Malbork (143,591 square metres) or even Windsor (54,835 square metres).

We’d imagined that it would take us the afternoon to look round. As it turned out, it didn’t take much more than an hour (and that was at a slow pace). Overall, Bouillon was by far the more interesting castle to visit…..

Overnight: Sedan (17 April)

We managed to get onto the paid aire at Sedan, from where we could walk to the castle. It cost us €15.60, but €5 is that is to buy a membership card for the group of motorhome aires that this one belongs to. They do seem to have a lot of aires signed up to the scheme, so we’re sure we’ll be able to reuse the card elsewhere at some point.

Our plan for the next few days is to trundle slowly up the French/Belgian border. We’ve got another week before our ferry back to the UK and plenty still to look at.