Europe > France > Pas-de-Calais > Arras > Articles > Historic towns of the Low Countries

“Laddeez and dzjohntleman, een a few momment we shall be entairing ze Shannelle Tonnelle”.

The nice thing about letting the train take the strain in continental Northern Europe is that the railways run swiftly and to time. Less than three hours after boarding Eurostar at Waterloo I was sitting on a local train to Arras, watching the pale gold cornfields of French Flanders flow past the window.

The arc of low-lying country that curves north-east from France through Belgium and up into south-west Holland is studded with historic towns, remarkably well preserved (or painstakingly reconstructed) considering the endless succession of wars that have devastated the Low Countries since the Vikings arrived with fire and sword over a thousand years ago. Full of fine medieval architecture, awash with the best beer in Continental Europe, their museums and churches stuffed with art treasures, it is astonishing that they are not entirely swamped by British tourists.

Looking around the centre of Arras, admiring the ranks of columns and arches in the arcades of the neighbouring Grand Place and Place des Héros, and the upthrust of the town hall’s great belfry, you would never guess that all this was reduced to rubble during the First World War. Arras was right in the front line then, a British stronghold around which the fighting raged.

Up in the belfry after lunch I enjoyed a cool breeze and a fine far view over the twin squares and the spires and roofs of Arras, out to the rim of the flat disk of cornland in which the town sits. Then it was down into the bowels of the earth for a tour of Les Boves, the extraordinary labyrinth of tunnels that underlies the town. There are about 20 miles of passages, stairways and vaulted caverns under Arras. They were started by chalk quarriers a thousand years ago, and have sheltered citizens and soldiers in hard times ever since. During the First World War 12,000 Allied soldiers sweated and tunnelled below the town. Their ghostly faces stared from photographs as I bent my head to pass under the low arches. It made an eerie walk, often cramped and crouched, with glimpses of side tunnels jagging off into the gloom like the echoes of disturbed dreams.

Crossing European borders is a complete non-event in these EU days. The following morning the train from Lille pulled up in Ghent station before I was even aware that I had entered Belgium. Bruges hooks the vast majority of Belgium’s tourists because of its fairytale neatness. Ghent is much more of a living city, bustling and noisy, its waterways lined with fine merchants’ houses, guildhalls and churches built through medieval wool wealth and later prosperity from grain trading.

I started in the Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Museum of Fine Arts), south of the city centre. Here I ogled Christ Carrying His Cross by Hieronymus Bosch (madly distorted, wicked faces), a lip-lickingly lecherous Jupiter by Van Dyck, a small, violent Scourging of Christ by Rubens, and a frowning woman painted in 1640 by Frans Hals.

As a tart dessert to all this rich culture I went across the road to the appropriately acronymed S.M.A.K. (Museum of Modern Art), and enjoyed an hour’s grinning and tut-tutting at much splendid nonsense: an inflatable phallus, a heap of driftwood, 289 eggshells, a forest of neurotically ticking clocks, and a room with a mirrored floor and ceiling where two short-skirted visitors shrieked to see their knickers reflected to infinity.

In the town centre two remarkably beautiful quays flank the placid waterway - the Korenlei on the west with stylish 18th-century houses, and facing it the far older buildings of the Graslei. Here, propping each other up like weather-beaten old sailors after a night on the grog, are a 16th-century stonemasons’ guildhall, a tottering crowstepped woolstaplers’ house some 800 years old, the fruit-and-cherub-laden house of the corn-measurer, and the wonderful pinnacled and traceried hall built for Ghent’s powerful 16th-century Guild of Free Boatmen.

I saw all this from a cruise boat, moving slowly through the old town’s heart. Medieval merchants’ houses of mellow brick and the dark walls of old weaving mills went by as we slipped under bridges inches below the feet of passing townsfolk. An hour later I was hundreds of feet in the air above the crowds, looking out from the windy platform of the Belfort belfry in the Buttermarket with the whole of Ghent laid out head-swimmingly far below.

St Baaf’s Cathedral contains one art treasure that by itself would richly repay a visit to Ghent. A side chapel holds Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, a huge altarpiece designed to be folded into sections, painted in 1432. A youthful, dark-bearded God sits on high, flanked by musical angels and the naked Adam and Eve. Below, saints and angels worship the Lamb. Dozens of Biblical figures fill the painting’s landscape (unmistakably Flemish), along with exquisitely painted flowers, trees and distant towers and spires. The detail was so fine that I could see every tiny jewel in the hems of robes, each vein and wrinkle in the feet of the worshippers, and the minutest of pebbles beneath those feet.

Next day, under a clear blue sky, the train took me east into Holland across another of those invisible Low Countries borders. The accents thickened and the beer thinned, but the crowstepped gables and brick façades of the tall thin waterfront houses of Dordrecht might have been transplanted from Ghent. The first woman I saw was smoking a pipe as she bicycled over the cobbles.

Three rivers - the Oude Maas, the Noord and the Merwede - meet at the northern edge of Dordrecht. Wandering through the ornate arch of the city’s old Groothoofdspoort gate I came suddenly on this great junction of European waterways, an immense stretch of olive-green water where vast barges hundreds of feet long rumbled quietly by with their loads of gravel and fuel.

Dordrecht with its many little harbours and water channels is a great place for roaming. I went down by the Nieuwe Haven among old steamboats, and walked along ranks of tall houses built for wool merchants and wine shippers. The tower of the Grote Kerk beckoned: another of those Low Countries church towers where an upwards spiral slog is rewarded with a great view. Up at the top of 274 steps, Dordrecht and its bridges, rivers and ponderous barges lay open for admiration.

Under the choir seats there were vigorous medieval misericord carvings to chuckle at - a woman decking a devil with a wrestling throw, a housewife riding her husband like a donkey, a young lad having his bottom smacked, two cherubs snogging. And in Dordrechts Museum I found a sprinkling of 17th-century Old Masters: a Cuyp Adoration of the Magi, some stolidly self-confident Dordrecht mintmasters and administrators painted by Willaerts and van Hoogstraten, and a 20ft-long View of Dordrecht by Willaerts in which I could make out both the looming Grote Kerk and the square bulk of the Groothoofdsport.

The last town of my railway ramble through the Low Countries was the most tourist-orientated. From the moment I arrived in Delft, there were American accents in the pavement cafés and American plastic swiping through the souvenir shop tills. Delft is gorgeously pretty. Its humpback bridges with bicyclists crossing, its eye-pleasing old houses winding with their mirroring canals, are as easy on the viewfinder as they were on the palette of local boy Jan Vermeer back in the 17th century.

Above all, Delft boasts its celebrated blue and white pottery, which has been made and handpainted in the town for 400 years. “I started two years ago,” said Sietske van Opzeeland, squinting with concentration over the bird she was painting on to a plate at the Porceleyne Fles factory. “Every one I make, I put my signature, SvO - see? And when I find one of mine in a shop, it makes me happy.”

In the factory showroom a Californian woman nonchalantly proferred plastic as the assistant wrapped ten large handpainted dinner plates for her. I considered remortgaging my house to buy one of Sietske’s beautiful bird plates, but not for long.

Up at the top of the Nieuwe Kerk tower, 350 feet above the green canals and neatly ranked houses, I looked down at the lanes of the Thursday market seething like a well-ordered ant’s nest in the town square far below. The Nieuwe Kerk’s carillon came streaming around me, and then the cold breezy air was filled with the celestial silvery noise of thousands of bells ringing out midday from all the towers and steeples of Delft.

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