On 28 May 1884, King Leopold II, believing it essential to connect several villages to existing railway lines, enacted a law creating the National Society of Local Railways, abbreviated as SNCV. Three local railway lines were constructed in our region. We are now in front of the station on the line that connected Clavier to Comblain-au-Pont. Its main purpose was to open up rural areas. This gave the Condroz plateau access to the Ourthe valley, then the Meuse valley and finally the rail network of the North Belgian Railway Company.

This rural line transported goods, mainly natural stone from the region’s quarries and agricultural products (beets, pulp, flax, flour, bran, hay and straw), but also cement, wood, chemical fertilisers, and coal.

This tramway was also open to passengers. Many commuters and workers used the Comblain-Clavier line (in 1908, there were 6,554 season ticket holders).

Initially built to a metric gauge for greater flexibility and ease of manoeuvring in the countryside, the tracks were gradually converted to a gauge of exactly 1.435 metres (the standard gauge for trains, which is said to originate from the width of chariots in the Roman Empire). Some tracks were doubled (one metric and the other to railway standards) to avoid transhipment between the tram and the train.

The Anthisnes station, shown in the photograph, was crucial for the distribution of the products from the quarries, which were flourishing at the time.

The local railway ceased operations in 1955.

The photograph shows a brick and limestone building dating from the late 19th century. Today the municipal school occupies the premises, after sharing them with the municipal administration for decades.

The municipal administration moved to Cour d’Omalius in 2018.

In the background, you can see the former gendarmerie. This building previously housed the Anthisnes brass band, a café-restaurant, and a hairdresser.

On the edge of this marsh, which was transformed into a public square in 1992, there was also the famous “Cathédrale du Condroz”. This magnificent building was completely destroyed by a violent fire on 14 November 1973. The church was rebuilt and inaugurated in November 1992.

Today, you can also see the memorial to the victims of the two World Wars, which was moved from avenue de l’Abbaye in 1967.

This postcard shows the Carrefour de Hody, which witnessed a tragic episode in our history. It was at this crossroads that several residents of Hody lost their lives on 6 September 1944.

That day, German forces launched a punitive expedition following the death of several SS soldiers in an ambush organised the day before by armed partisans. Motorcycles, machine guns and armoured vehicles gathered at this location, massacring innocent inhabitants of the small village and setting fire to houses with flamethrowers. By the end of their rampage, 17 people had been killed and numerous houses destroyed. The young Joseph Motkin escaped the massacre. He would become a town councilor in the early 1980s.

The Hourant farm, on the left of the photograph, was completely razed to the ground and the houses on Vinâve, a small street in the centre, were set on fire. The first house at the entrance to this street was a bowling alley called Au cheval blanc. Only ruins remained.

The street leading to Anthisnes on the right was then nothing more than a path.

In 1949, a monument was erected in memory of the victims. It features the Liège Perron – a symbol of freedom – the names of the victims and a few words separated by dots and spaces that echo the sound of machine guns.

Between Vien and Fairon, La Rock is a hamlet of Anthisnes.
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Most of the houses are built of limestone and covered with grey tiles or slates, giving this Condroz hamlet a beautiful uniformity of tone.

Despite its small size, La Rock had its own quarry, which mainly produced kerbstones and paving stones. The hamlet also had a estaminet (a place where the inhabitants could meet and relax), whose sign can be seen above the door of the first house on the right of the photo.

Until the Second World War, the men were mainly quarry workers. There were also a few agricultural workers. The women took care of the house and children, but they also raised animals (mostly cows) in a stable attached to the house for the family’s needs.

The animals (cows, sheep) grazed on what are called thiers (thier means hillside, a fairly steep slope, or a steep path), which can be seen in the background and have now been replaced by woods.

At the time this place was called Limont-Chapelle Station. It was the local vicinal tramway stop.

On 28 May 1884, King Leopold II, believing it essential to connect several villages and small cities to existing railway lines, enacted a law creating the National Society of Local Railways, abbreviated as SNCV. There were three lines in our region.

• The Clavier – Val Saint-Lambert line
• The Clavier – Comblain-au-Pont line
• The Warzée – Ougrée line

It is the latter that we are concerned with here.The stops were Warzée – Ougrée via Ellemelle – Moulin – Tavier – Hoût-si-Ploût – Plainevaux – Boncelles – Chatqueue (Seraing) – Haut-Pré (Liège), and finally Ougrée.

This 21.20 km line was put into service to Boncelles on 15 May 1914 and from Boncelles to Ougrée on 21 May 1925.

Operations ceased definitively in 1947, three years after the ambush that took the lives of nine GIs (US Army soldiers), whose memory is honoured by a nearby monument.

We are in the heart of the village of Tavier with its local stone houses. The photograph shows small shops (‘where you could find a bit of everything’). The site has been listed since 1996.

Opposite is the 18th-century Church of Saint-Martin, now somewhat hidden by an imposing monument honouring soldiers who died for their country in both world wars. This building contains treasures that can now be discovered thanks to a QR code located near the entrance.
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Adjacent to the church, the imposing farm-castle dominates the Magrée valley. The complex is organised around a keep and a courtyard. The farm buildings are grouped closely together and dominated by the main building. Note the watchtower (pepper pot) that seems to be watching us.

The castle was the seat of one of the seven “beyond the woods” seigneuries of the former Duchy of Limburg (an enclave in the Principality of Liège, Condroz and Ardennes, comprising Villers-aux-Tours, Sprimont, Esneux, Tavier, La Chapelle, La Rimière and Baugnée).

Between Anthisnes and Vien, there is a dry stone wall of several hundred metres long. It used to mark the boundary of the nearby quarry.

Dry stone walls are part of our heritage, bearing witness to the traditional techniques, knowledge and skills of the past. The fact that they are built without mortar makes them permeable and resistant to pressure from water and the ground. They are made of fitted and cut blocks or stacked rubble stones.

They bear witness to the quarrying past of Anthisnes and Vien.

However, on the heights, we can see a bourgeois house (probably from the 19th century) built of red bricks: the Delvaux house. At the time, the notables had their houses built of bricks to distinguish them from other rubble stone buildings (houses, farms, etc., most of which date from the 17th and 18th centuries).

This is a striking contrast to our era, where natural stone has become a premium building material.

The quarries of Anthisnes provided the materials for the monument to King Albert and the construction of the Albert Canal, as well as blocks for shaping the polders in the Netherlands, for the columns of the Pont de Fragnée and for the Grand Poste in Liège. Anthisnes stone was considered to be among the best.

Despite the name of the square, the ponds do not appear in the photo.

Since the 19th century, there were four ponds, which were used for fishing. They were gradually abandoned because they required a lot of maintenance.

The nearby café, which served as both a community hall and a meeting place, was called Le Casino des digues. Afterwards, a village committee with the name “asbl L’Espoir du Vallon” was formed, which later became “Le Val Pierrys”. It created the eponymous hall on the left side of the square thanks to a donation of land by the Count of Massol.

The photograph also shows rue des Pierrys (quarries in Walloon), which bears witness to the municipality’s quarrying past.
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On the left, you can see the municipal school, which has now been replaced by a nursery.

In the centre, at the foot of rue du Thier (thier means hillside, a fairly steep slope, or a steep path in Walloon), you can see a few cows being taken, as they are every evening, to the municipal watering place. These watering places, which existed in every municipality, remained in use until the early 1960s.

Villers means villa and therefore refers to an ancient Roman farm.

This village consists of four hamlets: Targnon, Fecher, Chainay, and Ratintot.

Fecher (originally el Fètchire in Walloon) means fern, Chainay means a place planted with oak trees, and Ratintot was a meeting place, a drinking establishment where the café owner “waited for everything” or expected everything...

The hamlet of Ratintot is at the entrance to Villers-aux-Tours, above the village street shown on this postcard from the early 20th century, at the crossroads of Saint-Donat.

A little anecdote: in the 17th century, a character named Ratintot was caught red-handed looting on the Ourthe, where he was ransoming travellers. He was one of those brigands who attacked boatmen.

He was imprisoned in the Château de la Tour in Esneux, from where he mysteriously managed to escape and rejoin his wife and five children in the Liège region, barely 10 km away.

As for the towers, they were scattered in different places, but one of them was clearly the keep of the old castle.

Villers-aux-Tours (Viyåtour in Walloon).

Located between the villages of Limont, Hody and the Grand Bois d’Anthisnes, Villers-aux-Tours consists of one main street: rue du Village, along which stand the Saint-Donat (1863) and Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes chapels, as well as the municipal school and the L’Espoir hall. In the 13th century, the village of Villers-aux-Tours was part of the Duchy of Limburg and belonged to the “beyond the woods” seigneuries of the former Duchy of Limburg (an enclave in the Principality of Liège, Condroz and Ardennes, comprising Villers-aux-Tours, Sprimont, Esneux, Tavier, La Chapelle, La Rimière and Baugnée).

As can be seen in the photograph, the village has a cluster of old limestone houses.

In the middle of this cluster stands a majestic castle. Built in the Louis XIV style, it was constructed at the behest of the lord of Logne, Godefroid de Rahier, and his wife Anne-Marie Philippe d’Argenteau on the occasion of their marriage between 1682 and 1687, on the site of a feudal residence that had been burned down in 1675. The Château de Villers-aux-Tours was property of the delle Heys family since the 13th century. It was one of the most beautiful castles in the country, with a double moat and four towers, hence the name of the village.

Today the château is owned by a company providing accommodation for adults with disabilities.

Salle L’Espoir was built by the villagers, who wanted a place to host various activities and festivities in Villers-aux-Tours. A committee was created in 1886, headed by a young schoolteacher, Arnold Sauvage. A choral and drama society was then formed under the name ‘L’Espoir de Villers-aux-Tours’. Initially housed in a wooden building, they soon had to abandon it.

After the war, they built their own hall on land donated by the then châtelaine, at the junction of rue Fecher and rue du Village.
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The villagers salvaged materials from a building in Haillot (between Perwez and Ohey) and, after numerous trips in horse-drawn carts, the L’Espoir hall was born. It was inaugurated in 1919.

At the end of rue Fecher (originally el Fètchire in Walloon, meaning “fern”), there is a water tower which has been converted into a residential building.

We are now on the edge of the hamlet of Villers-aux-Tours. Beyond that lies the Bois du Mary in Esneux. Further down, on the banks of a small stream with the charming name of La Pisserotte, you can see a menhir carved during the stone symposium organised by the municipality of Anthisnes in 1998.

In the foreground, the bicycle leaning against the wall bears witness to the main means of transport at the time. Most of the roads were just gravel tracks, as the photograph shows, and it took a lot of courage, strength and balance for cyclists to travel from one village to another.