Natural healing

I know, I know: it's been a week since I last posted and I'm sure you're all waiting impatiently for episode # 2 of my mini-travelogue. It's been a busy week, as most of my spare time has been spent preparing for tomorrow's flea market. At the time of writing, everything is priced and labelled and our dining room has temporarily morphed into a vintage shop, with not one but two rails full of colourful attire. Fingers crossed that people will be seduced into buying at least some of it.

But that is now, and this was then: the morning of our first full day at our lakeside cottage in Belgium's west country. My diligently kept diary tells me that this was Monday the 16th of June which - eek - is just under a month ago already.

We woke up to glorious sunshine and a bright blue sky which greeted us upon drawing our curtains. Stepping onto the balcony, we breathed in lungfuls of delicious Summer air and watched the antics of the resident moorhens and their young who were frolicking in the duckweed covered pond. I instantly spotted the heron, who is a regular visitor here. You can see him waiting for his breakfast to float by while sitting quite regally on a tangle of dead branches halfway across the pond (above,top right). 

We'd only made the vaguest of plans for our last-minute holiday, apart from letting nature heal our battered souls. This being our first day, we decided to ease ourselves into things gently by going for a stroll around the castle domain in Zonnebeke, a 20-minute drive from the cottage. Established on the site of a former Augustinian abbey (1072-1796), it incorporates the Passchendaele Museum which tells the harrowing history of the Battle of Passchendaele, fought between July and November 1917. The battle is known as one of the most horrific ones from the First World War, with almost 600.000 casualties for a movement of the frontline of only eight kilometres.

After parking our car, we made our way into the heart of the domain, passing the 8-metre-tall pou maumahara (memorial carving) honouring the role of New Zealand’s Māori in the First World War. 

The museum and information centre are located in a lake-fronted Normandy-style mansion which was built in 1922 to replace a castle bombarded into rubble during the war. Here, Jos rested his feet on a bench on the verandah, while I wandered inside to pick up a map of the domain. 

In spite of this only being a smallish domain and we were carrying a map, I'm sure that you won't be all that surprised that we succeeded in getting ever so slightly lost the first time we were here in September 2021. Vowing to do better this time, we confidently took the path skirting the pond, passing a posse of sunbathing ducks along the way. 

Faced with a choice of woodland paths, we selected one at will, which soon brought us to a grassy clearing dotted with random pools of red picket fences. These are the Passchendaele Memorial Gardens, a series of eight poppy-shaped remembrance gardens created for the Battle of Passchendaele's centenary in 2017, each one designed by one of the nations that took part in the battle.

Set somewhat aside from the others is the New Zealand garden (above), its centre piece a hollow concrete column, the scale of the door requiring visitors to bend low to enter, echoing the physical confinement of the battlefield trenches. The entrance was so low that even vertically challenged yours truly managed to bump her head on the door's concrete lintel on her way out ...

With its abundant planting of pale pink roses and bright yellow Verbascum thapsus (commonly known as great mullein) towering above me, the United Kingdom's garden offered the perfect backdrop to show you my outfit. My beloved zig-zag patterned skirt, charity shopped in the Summer of 2021, has been a faithful travelling companion ever since. This time I combined it with a parrot-patterned top from the Belgian Sweet Soda label, which was a charity shop find back in October. You can see a close-up of its pattern below. The stretchy belt, which is the latest of such belts to join my collection, was a € 3 Think Twice sales bargain on my final working day before the holiday.

The haori-style cover-up, yet another charity shop find from a couple of years ago, is a firm favourite. I only recently found out that its origins lie in a fast fashion shop I wouldn't be seen dead in ...

The UK garden, being the only one in possession of a bench, also offered the perfect place to have our picnic of cheese sandwiches with an accompaniment of crisps. The poppy napkins - which we found in a drawer in the cottage - couldn't have been a better choice for the job. 

Although we briefly visited all of the gardens, we couldn't help noticing that some of them were looking quite untended and overgrown, particularly when compared to our previous visit.

The only remaining one worth photographing was the Belgian garden, which has artwork by the artist-sculptor Rik Ryon from Poperinge (°1950) who mainly works with debris of war.  Absolutely striking is the incorporation of some Belgian military gravestones. Designed by Brussels architect Fernand Simons, they have never been used for any military burials. They are containing messages of peace in all three of Belgium's national languages (Flemish, French and German).

There's also the final stanza of the poem Pozières and Passchendaele by the Australian war poet Oscar Walters (1889-1948). 

After visiting the poppy gardens, we made our way back to the car park, passing a rather sinister looking pond. The castle grounds being in the middle of the former battlefield, this is not a natural feature of the landscape, but a crater which owes its existence to detonated mines.

After stopping at the supermarket to pick up the ingredients of our evening meal, we drove back to the cottage where we spent the rest of the afternoon and evening reading and relaxing. We ended our day as it began, sitting on the balcony, and watching the sun go down over our own private and peaceful pond.

Tuesday the 17th of June promised to be another day on which the mercury would climb to the mid-twenties. After a restful night and a leisurely breakfast, we were ready for another dose of natural healing. This we found in a cluster of woods collectively known as the Sixtusbossen, about 5 kilometers from where we were staying.

There's a convenient car park which is the starting point for a number of walks based on one of the famous numbered walking maps of the area. This of course offers no guarantee that we won't get lost at least once. Au contraire!

In spite of the fact that the car park was inundated with road workers and their infernal machinery, we managed to grab a spot in the shade of a small tree. Armed with a map and our picnic, we set off, stubbornly refusing to follow any numbers at all by selecting the shadiest path of all. Soon we came across some delightful wood carvings, which made us realize we'd been here before (in September 2020, or so my blog tells me). 

And look, here's the  giant swing set in the middle of the woods I just had to have a go on back then. 

Long-forgotten childhood moments were once again revived by swinging blissfully to and fro.

I was wearing the chambray maxi skirt picked up from Think Twice in May 2023, another one which always accompanies me on my travels. My cotton Mer du Nord blouse was charity shopped one year earlier, while my haori-style cover-up (yes, I've got more than one!) was a gift from my friend Inneke last year.

Still stubbornly insisting on following our noses rather than the numbered markers, we soon passed this shady bench in a grassy clearing (above, bottom right), which would have been perfect for our picnic if it hadn't been far too early for lunch. On the top left, Jos is fruitlessly looking for a four-leaf clover. In case you were wondering :-)

Shortly afterwards, we came to a minor tarmacked road, which we crossed, following a sign to Dozinghem Military Cemetery which lies at the end of a single track lane. The cemetery, which was designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield (1856-1942), contains 3174 Commonwealth as well as 65 German war graves from the First World War.

In preparation for the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917, the British army set up a number of extra field hospitals behind the lines. There were three such hospitals in this area, and the soldiers who died of their wounds were buried here. The place Dozinghem does not actually exist. It is the name given to one of the casualty clearing stations by the troops, the others being called Mendinghem and Bandaghem.

Visiting these military cemeteries - which are par for the course here in Flanders Fields - is always a sobering experience. 

Leaving the cemetery, we finally saw sense and followed a couple of numbered markers until we arrived back at our starting point where we had our picnic sitting on a bench in the woods. Then we drove back to the cottage for a little siesta and spending some time with my current read.

Ernt Allbright, a former POW, comes home from the Vietnam war a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes an impulsive decision: he will move his family north, to Alaska, where they will live off the grid in America’s last true frontier. The novel primarily focused on thirteen-year-old daughter Leni. 

But the day wasn't finished just yet. As some of you may remember, my brother and his girlfriend moved to a cottage on an old brewery estate less than 10 minutes from our holiday cottage back in 2023. We visited them and had a tour of the brewery and their ecological vegetable garden in September of that year. Not being very communicative and hardly ever switching on his phone, we hadn't been able to contact him and tell him we would be in the area so, on the off-chance they would be at home, we set out. The cottage looked strangely deserted and as we got no response after knocking repeatedly on their front door, we dropped a note through their letter box, expecting to hear from them when they got home eventually.

We waited and waited some more, but no message from them was forthcoming.  How strange! Would they have missed our note? Or were they on a holiday of their own, perhaps?

I'm leaving you with a cliffhanger here, so be sure to come back for episode # 3!