Hiking

The Brux-to-Lux Trail

Contributed by Hugh Pope

13 September 2026

Brussels, Belgium to Luxembourg, Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

A first-person account of a 380km, 20-stage hike from Brussels to Luxembourg, done a day at a time over a year using Belgium's trains and buses, taking in battlefields, castles, forests and half-forgotten history along the way.

Distance

380

Stages

20

Days

20

Ascent

5530

Descent

5250

High point

560

Unpaved

64

Paths

76

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I'm not sure when the idea of walking from Brussels to Luxembourg fixed itself in my head. I know that once the paths started drawing me south of Brussels, I just kept going. If a day dawned with blue sky, or I heard a train whistle not far from my house in Schaerbeek, I felt a yearning for the countryside: muddy ways beside rippling streams, farm tracks by open fields, silent footpaths through forests.

For most of my first decade in Brussels I rarely felt the need to leave the city. I ran in the local park, walked where I needed to go, occasionally rode a Villo bike. The grey, decrepit highways stretching out to Belgium's borders were no advertisement for getting to know the country better. But in 2025 I had more time on my hands, and the flexibility to do whatever I wanted, whenever the fancy took me. I felt the need for a new sense of mission.

I didn't want short circuits, however pretty. A long walk that actually went somewhere might give me a goal to be getting on with, something to anticipate and later look back on. Belgium's excellent network of local trains and buses meant I could get a long way from Brussels and back in a day, and a chain of those day-long walks could add up to a real journey.

My destination took a while to settle on. Germany seemed too vast, the Netherlands too flat and familiar, and France is so big that even car journeys never seem to end. I wanted hill country, something like the walks my wife Jessica and I had stumbled on around Spa in the eastern Ardennes. The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg slowly grew on me: a small, half-forgotten principality that doesn't seem to be on the way to anywhere, which is rather what I liked about it. The railway line there, opened in the 1850s, has frequent stops, and once I was in Luxembourg the public transport, I was told, was free.

Planning twenty one-day stages that kept a good distance from traffic, avoided built-up areas, sought out natural beauty, stayed off tarmac, and still ended at a railway station I could get home from, took a lot of trial and error. I added the Komoot app to my phone and became addicted to it. The trail that resulted is 380 km long, prioritising landscape over speed - more than double the 180 km a crow would fly - avoiding asphalt nearly four-fifths of the way, climbing and descending some 5,500 metres in all.

My dog Einstein came with me on almost every stage, my wife Jessica on many of them. Together we tracked rivers like the Sambre, the Meuse, the Lesse and the Lomme, crossed the battlefields of Waterloo and the Battle of the Frontiers, dove into forests thick with hunting stands and hermitages, learned about Gallo-Roman graves and witch trials, until, twenty stages and a year later, we walked into Luxembourg city itself.

What follows is the journey, one day-stage at a time. In April 2027, 'The Brux-to-Lux Trail' is being published by Antwerp's Luster Publishing. It will be a 250-page book, with maps, GPS links, photos and several pages of observations about what I found on each day's stage.

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Stage 1: GRAND PLACE (Brussels) to Boitsfort

Distance

11.4

Unpaved

82

I took the first steps of the walk among the selfie-snappers of the Grand Place, my dog Einstein at my side, and headed up the steps of the Mont des Arts under a clear March sky. I paused at the Place Royale before the equestrian statue of Godfrey of Bouillon, a crusader knight. In a gesture that would best not be repeated today, Belgium's nineteenth-century nation-builders adopted this first crusader King of Jerusalem as a hero. Still, Godfrey made it overland as far as the Holy Land: even if he did probably travel by horse, tens of thousands of people in the Catholic Pope's "people's crusade" followed him on foot on this ultimate long-distance trail.

I skirted the Royal Palace and the Parc de Bruxelles, past the late 19th century Belgian King Leopold II on his horse - a pigeon, as ever, perched on his head - and on through the cafés of St Boniface to the Étangs d'Ixelles and the grounds of the Abbaye de la Cambre. Near Avenue Louise I stopped at the bust of Jean de Selys-Longchamps, the Belgian pilot who flew his RAF Typhoon up this avenue at roof height in 1943 to machine-gun the local Gestapo headquarters.

The route then carried me into the Bois de la Cambre and the Forêt de Soignes, past a wayside chapel and a troop of scouts, until I reached Boitsfort at the edge of the forest, twelve kilometres and, remarkably for a walk through a capital city, more than four-fifths of it on paths rather than roads.

Setting off

Stage 2: Boitsfort to Groenendaal

Distance

7.6

Unpaved

93

Before the day's walk proper, I went looking for the Château Charle-Albert, the finishing school my great-aunt Phyllis Garle had attended in 1912, and found it freshly restored behind wrought-iron gates. From Boitsfort I picked up the trail again at another mansion, the Alfred Solvay family's pile by the station, and passed through the gate of their old walled vegetable garden into the Forêt de Soignes.

A stern voice from a bench reminded me that dogs must stay on the lead, so for a kilometre Einstein and I walked more soberly than we'd have liked, past lakes fringed with budding new leaves. This short stage of just 7.5km runs mostly through ancient beech forest, a UN World Heritage site straddling Brussels, Flanders and Wallonia, and thick with wood anemones under trees whose beech ancestors first recolonised this land after the last ice age.

Walking here, I kept thinking of my great-aunt, who trained as a nurse and then a driver in this same country during the First World War, and of the many family threads - a hospital for Belgian refugees in a family house in Kent, a great-grandfather from Amsterdam, cousins buried in Flanders' fields - that already tied me to this corner of Europe before I ever thought of walking through it.

Stage 3: Groenendaal to La Hulpe

Distance

12.5

Unpaved

78

This gentle stage added an extra loop down through woods to the bed of the Ijse river before I turned back to Groenendaal and continued south along the dead-straight, cobbled Steenbruggendreef, sunlight flashing off stones like those my seafaring uncle once shipped as ballast on his barge.

Crossing from Flanders into Wallonia, I entered the Domaine Solvay, once part of Ernest Solvay's summer estate. I passed the strange 36-metre obelisk his grandson built to catch the dawn light, and the museum of sculptor Jean-Michel Folon, before reaching the elegant Château de la Hulpe itself, said locally to have partly inspired Hergé's Marlinspike Hall.

We finished with a coffee at the Café Ernest, under a photograph of the fifth Solvay physics conference of 1927, at which Albert Einstein himself had argued quantum theory with colleagues, seventeen of whom would go on to win Nobel prizes. Our own dog Einstein, named for his early skill at escaping his puppy pen, showed no interest in the connection and went straight to sleep on Jessica's lap.

Stage 4: La Hulpe to Bousval (OTTIGNIES)

Distance

18.3

Unpaved

60

This stage skirted the eastern edge of the Waterloo battlefield, a place that had lived in my head since childhood through my father's library and a forgotten 1816 book of engravings based on sketches by the English artist Robert Hills, who toured the battlefield a month after the fighting and described a Brussels turned into one vast hospital, and fields still littered with the roughly-buried dead.

I chose paths rather than the museum route: earthen tracks between meadows, a Belgian church steeple over Ohain, and down into the marshy valley of the Lasne, which Prussian troops had struggled through in the pouring rain of 18 June 1815 to reach Wellington in time. In a copse near Paris Wood I found a column to Colonel Wilhelm, Graf von Schwerin, likely the first Prussian officer killed at Waterloo, cut down by a shell as his Silesian Hussars approached the fighting.

Through Paris Wood itself, from where the Prussians launched the flank attack that undid Napoleon's day, and on past the cobbled village of Couture-Saint-Germain and its old hollow lanes, Einstein and I ran the last stretch to catch our bus at Bousval with minutes to spare.

Stage 5: Bousval (OTTIGNIES) to Ronce (Gembloux)

Distance

18.9

From the bus stop at Bousval, past a spring dedicated to St Bartholemy and a chapel to St Barbe, I began a day that turned into an unplanned history of Belgian religion and beer. A hand-written note taped to the door of a seventeenth-century chapel, protesting clerical child abuse, sat awkwardly against its dedication by a soldier grateful for surviving thirty years of war.

The path led me down through the ruins of Villers Abbey, once home to four hundred monks who controlled 10,000 hectares of land, and on past a Kongolo missionary memorial and a roadside hermitage. Beyond Gentinnes the country opened into vast fields under wind turbines and the flight path into Charleroi airport, and I joined the Route du Malt, a trail promoting Belgian-grown barley in a country that mostly imports it.

I passed close to another Abbey, Aywiers, that is a brewery today and reflected on how thoroughly religion and brewing are entangled in Belgium. Close to the end of the stage I crossed the old Roman road, the Via Belgica, and found a shrine to St Eloi, patron of goldsmiths, farriers and, apparently, computer scientists, on the way to my bus at Ronce.

Stage 6: Ronce (Gembloux) to Franière

Distance

20

Waiting on the platform in Brussels amid a national strike against a government not yet in office, I reflected on the paradox that the trains kept running anyway, just unusually empty. My route from Ronce, once I'd wrangled the right bus, took me across fields including a diagonal right of way right through one vast expanse of newly farrowed earth, and past a chateau glimpsed above a railway spur on the way to the village of Onoz.

I passed under the E42 motorway and through villages with names like Tongrinnes, Marbisoux and Spy. Some in my family still don't believe that I really did no espionage during my years as a correspondent in the Middle East, so I make a selfie for them. Streams multiplied as the country began to hint at the forested Ardennes to come. By the time I reached the wide river Sambre and the hills overlooking it, it felt like I had reached an internal border.

I crossed to Franière station just as a delayed train pulled in, catching my first proper glimpse from the carriage window of Namur, Walloon capital I'd be walking into next. It looked grey, close-built and forbidding under the large fort that climbs up the hill overlooking the junction of the Sambre with the Meuse (Maas).

Stage 7: Franière to Namur

Distance

15.6

Unpaved

74

Leaving Franière, my wife Jessica and I found an earthen path along the Sambre full of birdsong. Still, it was hard to record thirty seconds of it without a train, truck or barge intruding somewhere in the background - a reminder that this valley has drawn industry for centuries. Floreffe Abbey's onion domes rose above the far bank, and we picnicked on the hillside above the village looking back at the former religious complex, the river and the great fields stretching north.

A long ridge walk through the Bois de la Basse Marlagne, an ancient wood a Dark Ages chronicler once called an abode of demons, took us past mossy cairns, a ruined 1892 fort, and a concrete mid-19th century bunker where I startled, and was startled by, a man living rough inside it. Emerging into Namur's millionaire mile of grand villas, we descended past the city's ancient fortifications - once dismissed by Napoleon as an ant-heap of tunnels - to the confluence of the Sambre and Meuse, and a first taste of the local Blanche de Namur beer by the quayside.

Stage 8: Namur to Godinne

Distance

23.4

Unpaved

80

I'd been looking forward to walking down the Meuse for a long time, and Namur made an easy start. I detoured up through the citadel's forested paths and millionaire-mile houses before dropping back to the riverbank, glad I'd made the diversion once I found the tarmac towpath itself busy with cyclists and traffic noise, more like an extension of city life than the wild river I'd imagined.

Still, the architecture along the way, in the local mix of brick and Belgian bluestone, was consistently handsome, and I lunched by the wide Isle of Dave, Belgium's largest island, watching barges and a water-skier pass. A loop of woodland behind Profondeville let me escape the road for a while, missing the 'Philosophical Way' of engraved plaques along the official path but gaining a tunnel of trees and a school courtyard instead. A long descent brought me down to the river again and the station at Godinne.

Stage 9: Godinne to Dinant

Distance

20.7

Unpaved

67

This stage turned out to be one of the most surprising of the whole trail. Climbing out of Godinne, I passed close by the entrance to the Yvoir Tunnel, remembered locally as the Hitler Tunnel after Adolf Hitler's train was meant to shelter there in October 1940 (his train couldn't manage the gradient, so he stayed the night in the station hotel instead), and Hermann Göring, who did use it, and set up house in a nearby chateau surrounded by art treasures stripped from local landowners.

After a climb through stone country past a working quarry, and the fortified village of Evrehailles, I lost my way badly trying to follow a mapped path that turned out to run through nettles, private woodland and, eventually, a rare warning across the track that it was private property. I trespassed for several kilometres before I regained the official grand randonnée route. (The trail now avoids both nettles and this illegal stretch!)

Descending past Leffe Abbey, whose beer is now brewed under licence elsewhere, I walked into Dinant along a long road of 19th century houses, blissfully cleared of cars for roadworks, past the birthplace of saxophone inventor Adolphe Sax, and the bridge where a young Charles de Gaulle was wounded as he led a doomed counter-charge against the invading German army in August 1914. The bridge is now named for him.

Stage 10: Dinant to Gendron-Celles

Distance

13.6

Unpaved

77

From Dinant station Jessica, Einstein and I crossed the Charles de Gaulle bridge and turned south along the Meuse past the Rocher Bayard, the crag that legend says was split by a leaping horse. History prefers to say that it was blasted by Louis XIV's military engineers. Now closed to climbers, Belgium's alpinist King Albert I did conquer it. Unfortunately, he later fell to his death on another cliff east of Namur in 1934.

At Anseremme, where the Lesse joins the Meuse, we picked up the river path alongside a happy procession of kayakers on the river. At one point, we were overtaken on the narrow track with a Dutch group struggling along on electric scooter-bikes. We arrived before the Château de Walzin, a fairy-tale castle on a cliff above the river that stopped me in my tracks. Later we cooled off with a swim in the shallow, cold water of the Lesse itself.

A riverside café, La Flobette, and a beer from the local Lesse Brewery rounded off what I still think may be the prettiest of all twenty stages, before we finished under a stone bridge at Gendron-Celles with time to spare before our train.

Stage 11: Gendron-Celles to Villers-sur-Lesse

Distance

19.4

Unpaved

87

At what is roughly the half-way point of the Brux-to-Lux Trail, Jessica and I climbed a surprisingly steep, officially 'alpine' hill out of Gendron-Celles rather than staying with the Lesse, giving us fine views but also dense woods that hid the wider landscape. On the way down we passed a Flemish couple calling for an ambulance for an injured walker, and later found the charmingly named Ywoigne stream running in complete silence.

A circular royal railway halt, built to lift Leopold II's carriages up to his hunting château, sat unnoticed above us until I read about it afterwards. We passed a buvette selling cheese and beer at Houyet, crossed onto the crumbly slate and shale bedrock of the Famenne. The going underfoot audibly changed character, becoming almost crackly.

A short stretch of the old Ravel railway line brought us under the E411 motorway to Luxembourg, running oddly at 90 degrees to our own much longer route. We reached the royal château of Ciergnon glimpsed above the Lesse, and finished the day at a small hotel and a good dinner under a wisteria in Villers-sur-Lesse.

Stage 12: Villers-sur-Lesse to Rochefort-Jemelle

Distance

18

Our host Alain, over a lavish breakfast, told us: 'here in the Famenne we have a bit of everything … the trouble with the Ardennes is that it's all just rivers and forests.' The first version of this stage however gave in to another form of monotony: tempted by the speed and short distance along a converted railway line, I left Éprave past a chapel built after an 1855 cholera epidemic and found myself walking on 90% asphalt and roads. It was so unsatisfying that I went back and walked it a different way for the Brux-to-Lux Trail's current route.

The better route ran south of Éprave to the 'emergence' of a tributary of the Lomme bubbling up from ninety metres underground through a slate hillock. I then climbed four kilometres of good earthen path to a lookout above Rochefort. The last stretch to Rochefort-Jemelle station followed the old railway line past mossy, four-hundred-million-year-old Devonian rock outcrops and a decaying industrial depot, ending near the quicklime works whose expansion the local abbey's monks had fought off to protect the water they need for their beer.

Stage 13: Rochefort-Jemelle to Grupont

Distance

18.5

High point

370

A missed bus sent me up an unplanned back route out of Rochefort-Jemelle station, over hills instead of along the rivers, and it turned out to be one of the finest surprises of the trail: I climbed to La Copette des Tiers, at 370 metres the highest point I'd reached so far, with a view I later realised stretched into France.

Blackberries lined the path most of the way, through the stone-built village of Ambly and up a hill that from a balcony in the forest gave me an amazing view of a giant Meuse-side stone quarry. Coming down toward Grupont, I realised I had lost my dog Einstein's collar. Back at Rochefort-Jemelle station, I had just time to retrace my first forest steps in a race against the next train. After a kilometre I miraculously found the collar in a heap of leaves. It had fallen off when I tied the lead round my waist while clearing branches.

Stage 14: Grupont to Poix-Saint Hubert

Distance

13

I hadn't noticed on my previous visit that the most remarkable half-timbered house at the beginning of the day's stage, a chateau at the half-way point and the abbey of Saint Hubert near the end were all bound up in one dreadful story: the burning at the stake in 1618 of four sisters, the Jamins, accused of witchcraft after a trial at Grupont's so-called Spanish House. Jessica and I spent a good half hour finding out more before we set off along the river Lomme.

At the château de Mirwart, where the sisters were tortured with a rack and forced draughts of scalding and freezing water, we stayed down by the river rather than climbing up to the imposing mansion, now a 20-room hotel and restaurant. We finished the day walking beside fine nineteenth-century railway bridges, river rapids, and small hydroelectric mills, arriving at Poix-Saint-Hubert. It was from the ancient abbey nearby that the former abbot, Nicolas de Fanson, had overseen the sisters' prosecution.

Stage 15: Poix-Saint Hubert to Libramont

Distance

20

Unpaved

87

High point

560

Following the shrinking Lomme upstream into deeper, darker Ardennes forest, I passed shooting stand after shooting stand, evidence of Belgium's serious hunting culture. Only once, though, did I hear shots ring out for what must have been a wild boar. I thought about Saint Hubert himself, the seventh-century hunter turned bishop for whom this forest is named, who reputedly gave up the chase after a stag he was pursuing turned to reveal a crucifix between its antlers. Oddly, he has become the patron saint of hunters.

My own path steadily climbed during the day to 560 metres, which I later found out was the highest point of the whole trail so far. Cardboard cut-outs of a fictional astronaut and a comic-strip wolf marked the approach to Libramont. After just missing my hourly train home I sat in a bar opposite the station, nursing a beer and thinking that, whatever the thrills of sitting in wait, powerful rifles, and hunting, I still preferred walking the forest paths.

Stage 16: Libramont to Neufchâteau

Distance

18

Rushing my planning for this stage led me astray: trying to beat the official, tarmac-heavy grand randonnée route, my own 'better' path turned out to be over half paved as well. Still, it led me past the entrance to Libramont's small Museum of the Celts, and into a chance education about the Celtic Belgae, ancient ancestors of the region. It was their art, rediscovered in the nineteenth century, that helped inspire Belgian Art Nouveau.

Past an industrial chicken farm and its cheerfully painted delivery truck, I then made a navigational error of my own, accidentally adding the town of Neufchâteau as an unwanted waypoint and nearly missing my train after chasing back uphill to where I should have turned off. I made it by minutes, another lesson in how easily an app can lead a walker astray.

Stage 17: Neufchâteau to Marbehan

Distance

32

I set out at 5.30am for the trail's longest single hike on a spooky, fog-bound Ardennes morning. I did not know at first that I would spend the whole day walking the ground of August 1914's Battle of the Frontiers. At least 27,000 French soldiers died on a single day, 22 August, than in the whole of French military history, or indeed on all sides of the one-day Battle of Waterloo. Many Germans were also killed, and indeed a German war memorial on the ridge above Neufchâteau was my first clue those events a century ago.

The path through the forest was long, gloomy, uninhabited and lonely. My imagination went into overdrive: saplings became soldiers, moss became something creepily ghostly, a bundle of dead leaves became, briefly and horribly, a hanging child.

Only afterwards did I learn that the route I'd walked to Suxy and on toward Marbehan overlapped almost exactly with the advance of one French column that met a much larger German force in the fog near Rossignol. The war cemetery I passed, Plateau, marked where the two armies first collided; the French war cemeteries closer to Rossignol mark the massacre when they fell back.

In the days after the battle, German forces rounded up 123 civilians in Rossignol. After being taken to Marbehan station, they were entrained to Arlon and then shot. Einstein and I speed-walked the last five kilometres to catch our train home, both of us wet, muddy, quiet and exhausted.

Stage 18: Marbehan to Oberpallen (ARLON)

Distance

35.6

Unpaved

75

I'd fantasised since my first days on the trail about arriving in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg under snow. One January morning, when the sun came out after a snow storm, I decided the time had come. I left Einstein at home because of the snow and the likely length of the stage: a 35.6km push for the border. Even for me, snow made everything harder than it looked, and the alpine walking sticks that I brought along made me discover muscles I hadn't used before.

Sunlight breaking through misty forest gave me one of the loveliest moments of the whole trail, near the cross-country skiing resort village of Anlier. It was around there that I crossed into the region once known as Lorraine, most of which is in France but of which part is still spiritually and linguistically on the Belgian side of the border.

Villages here still burn effigies of witches at spring bonfires, and I learned about the usoirs, the shared strips of ground in front of houses once piled with dung as a mark of prosperity. Near Nobressart, marauding Polish cavalry serving the Habsburgs massacred all but thirteen villagers during the Thirty Years War.

Towards nightfall, I found the 125th of 287 iron boundary bollards set up around the Grand Duchy after the 1839 Conference of London, and stepped over the Belgium-Grand Duchy border on a snowy forest path. I reached Oberpallen after dark for a bus to Arlon and the train home. For three days afterwards, I could barely walk: later versions of the trail will split this stage in two at Habay!

Stage 19: Oberpallen (ARLON) to Bour

Distance

20.3

Jessica and I took nearly four hours to reach the start of this stage, deciding to break the last two days with two nights in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. (It is also possible to return to Brussels the same day by the late train from Luxembourg city at the end of both days). Summer had transformed the country since my snowbound border crossing: fields of maize and wheat stood ready for harvest, and four-fifths of the day's route ran under trees, an experience the Grand Duchy's tourist board calls forest bathing.

For the first few kilometres, we crossed and recrossed the border repeatedly among old iron bollards in the forest, passed a solar-powered water purification station that delighted Jessica, and rested under great trees towering 30-40 metres above us. We passed a romantic ruined castle at Sieweburen, once a Roman-era fort, later fortified again against Norman raiders. After a stubborn campsite manager refused us a shortcut, forcing a stretch along a busy road, we finished the last kilometres balanced between fields and forest, reaching our hotel at Bour with the sense that Luxembourg's wealth were allowing it to take very good care of its patrimony.

Stage 20: Bour to Luxembourg city

Distance

27.1

Unpaved

64

On this last, twentieth stage, Jessica and I climbed to the Krékelbierg plateau, where a farmer's plough had once struck a Gallo-Roman amphora, uncovering graves of well-off early Roman-era residents complete with an Italian bronze lantern and a Spanish wine amphora. At Schönberg chapel by an old Roman road we found a facsimile of more Gallo-Roman civilisation, a Jupiter Column's base. Its carved Hercules later remodelled into a Christian saint and hidden under panelling for two centuries before rediscovery.

We crossed into forest for the final approach into Luxembourg city, reaching our hotel where it meets the woods, and later walked up to tea with an old friend, Turkish ambassador Faruk Kaymakçı, for a long conversation about Turkey, Britain and the European Union that we'd both, in our different ways, given decades of our working lives to.

We finished the trail in the Place d'Armes in the heart of Luxembourg city. We visited the nearby "Golden Lady" war memorial, the City Hall where the European Coal and Steel Community first met in 1952, and the National Art and History Museum, among whose many well-displayed treasures I found the real Hercules stone from Schönberg.

The train line home ran for just 199km, roughly half the distance the Brux-to-Lux Trail takes to cover the same journey on foot. Slowing down for a year to do so had, I felt, changed how I understood the country I live in, Belgium, and Europe too.

Highlights

• The fairy-tale Château de Walzin above the river Lesse, and a cold-water swim beneath it
• The Battle of the Frontiers forests around Neufchâteau and Rossignol, and the French war cemeteries hidden among them
• The Gallo-Roman graves of Krékelbierg and the Jupiter Column stone at Schönberg chapel, near the trail's end in Luxembourg
• Forest bathing through the Habscht Forest into Luxembourg on stage 19
• The witch trial sites at Grupont and Mirwart castle on the river Lomme
• Crossing the 1839 Belgium-Luxembourg border on foot at an original iron boundary bollard

Whereabouts

• Runs south-east from central Brussels through Walloon Brabant, the Namur river country (Meuse, Lesse, Lomme), the Famenne, the Belgian Ardennes and Belgian Lorraine, crossing into Luxembourg near Oberpallen and finishing in Luxembourg city
• 360km of walking against a direct crow-flight distance of about 180km, deliberately wandering to stay on paths and away from roads

Must-Know

• Almost every stage was planned to start and end at a station or bus stop reachable from Brussels in a day, though some later stages needed a night away
• Belgium's official grand randonnée long-distance trails often follow roads and tarmac; a better, quieter route usually had to be pieced together separately
• Hunting takes place in Ardennes forests through much of the year (wild boar year-round, deer October-December); a red notice marks a path where hunting is in progress
• Public transport in Luxembourg is free

Trail Notes

• More than 76% of the route is on paths and 64% avoids asphalt, mostly on forest tracks, farm lanes and riverside paths
• Sections along the Meuse and Lesse near Dinant and Anseremme are shared with cyclists and can be busy in summer
• Snow, mud and unmarked forest tracks caused several routefinding problems, especially in the Ardennes and Lorraine sections
• A phone hiking app (Komoot) with GPX files was essential throughout; paper maps and official signage were not reliable enough alone

Hazards

• Hunting stands and driven hunts are common in the Ardennes forests; check regional hunting-date listings if walking outside summer
• Winter walking after snowfall is far slower and harder than it looks, and hides streams and uneven ground underfoot
• Riverside cycle paths near Namur and Dinant carry fast bicycle and e-scooter traffic

Weather Window

• The stages were walked across a full year and in every season, from summer heatwaves to a January snowstorm, since the author waited for good weather rather than following a fixed schedule
• Winter stages in the high Ardennes involve genuine snow and ice; summer stages in open country can be very exposed to heat

Access

• Nearly every stage start and end point is served by Belgium's SNCB trains or regional buses, making it possible to walk from Brussels and be home the same night for most of the route
• The last stages, from Marbehan to Luxembourg city, are better done with an overnight stay in Luxembourg, reached via Arlon
• Luxembourg city has direct rail connections back to Brussels, journey about three hours