Gembloux

For centuries the abbey was a powerhouse of the written word. Its most famous monk, Sigebert of Gembloux, spent his life copying and composing books, and around 1100 finished the Chronicon, a history of the whole known world from the year 381 to his own day. Hand-copied across Europe, it became one of the main sources later scholars used for the churches and abbeys of this region — some 700 years before the farming school arrived. Little of the medieval town survives, but its belfry does: a squat 35-metre tower, all that remains of the vanished church of Saint-Sauveur, capped by a plump onion dome rebuilt after a 1905 fire. Unusually it hides among old alleys rather than a square, and in 2005 it joined UNESCO's list of Belgian and French belfries.

Twice the flat, open farmland around the town has drawn armies. On 31 January 1578, during the long Dutch revolt against Spanish rule, a Spanish army under Don John of Austria caught the rebels here; a young commander named Alexander Farnese led a cavalry charge that shattered them in minutes. Around 6,000 rebels fell against barely a dozen Spanish dead, and their leader was taken prisoner — a rout that helped break the fragile alliance of the Low Countries' provinces. The same "Gembloux gap" filled with soldiers again on 14–15 May 1940, when French tanks briefly halted Hitler's advancing panzers, a small victory made pointless when the Germans broke through far to the south.

The town you walk today is gentler. In the 1760s the architect Laurent-Benoît Dewez swept away the old monastery and raised the long, pale neoclassical ranges that still frame a 17-hectare park; since 1860 they have held Belgium's oldest school of agriculture. An easy audio-guided trail threads the brick lanes past the old cutlers' workshops, and just southwest of town the moated Château de Corroy-le-Château — a medieval fortress ringed by fat round towers, built around 1220 and held by one family for some eight centuries — opens its gates on summer Sundays.