As my regular reader knows, I have done a few road trips over the last few years to visit all the surviving menhirs of Belgium. (I grew up calling them “standing stones”, which is the usual UK / Ireland terminology, but local practice is to use the French term “menhir” which originates from the Breton for “long stone”, though apparently in modern Breton the completely different word “peulvan” is used.)

I’ve exhausted Belgian resources in this regard – the excellent Megalithic Portal lists several that I have not visited, but expresses serious doubt about whether any of them are real megaliths. But there is still plenty to look at in the neighbourhood. I had been tipped off by Herman Clerinx’s Roman book to the joys of Luxembourg, and a bit of research indicated that there was enough there to tick many of my antiquarian boxes.

So on Tuesday, the hottest day of the year so far, I set off down south for a long afternoon.

Diekirch: the necropolis and the museum

My first stop was the northern Luxembourgish town of Diekirch. It has a local beer, an obsession with donkeys, a museum of military history, a museum of historic motor vehicles, and a museum of the history of brewing. But I was not there for any of those. In the 1960s, excavations under the Church of St Lawrence revealed that it had been built on top of a Gallo-Roman necropolis, an indoor cemetery; and a block away a nearly intact large Roman mosaic was found in 1950.

The church is free, but to access the necropolis and mosaic you have to pay a very modest entrance fee to the Diekirch History Museum, which I warmly recommend. The museum is very accessible and friendly. Unfortunately all the displays are in German; there are leaflets available in other languages but they really don’t cover much of the content.

Deiwelselter

On a rock outcrop overlooking the town of Diekirch is the site of what used to be a megalithic dolmen, the Devil’s Altar or Deiwelselter in Luxembourgish. From the number of stones, it must have been about half the size of the big Wéris dolmens, far bigger than the Irish ones that I grew up with. Unfortunately, in 1892 the city fathers of Diekirch decided to rearrange the stones into a large arch shape, completely destroying the existing structure. God save us from the arrogance of the nineteenth-century antiquarian.

It’s quite a hike to get to as well. I am afraid that I ignored the ‘No Entry’ sign at the bottom of the lane, and parked at the edge of a field. Today’s city fathers of Diekirch could profitably think about improving access.

Beisenerbierg

The only genuine menhir surviving in the whole Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is near the town of Mersch. It was buried until 1978 and then erected on its present location, 30 metres from where it was found. It’s unusual among menhirs in that it’s on top of a hill – usually they are on the flank of a slope. Some commentators claim to see an anthropomorphic shaping of its profile; I am not convinced myself, but see what you think.

Of the four monuments I tracked down in the field, this was by far the easiest to find – you park in a layby by a 17th century chapel, and then the path from the chapel is pretty obvious. (And it’s interesting that although the stone itself was buried for centuries, Christianity built a shrine nearby.)

Häerdcheslee / La Roche des Payens

I have never seen anything quite like this before.

Here are two figures carved into a sandstone boulder on a hillside. In the rock above them is a rectangular pit (which I am not athletic enough to access). Are they gods? A funeral memorial? Who knows? Nearby rock show signs of stone-age grooves, but the Häerdcheslee figures are dated firmly to the first century AD (…ish).

In his novel L’homme qui rit, Victor Hugo makes a passing reference to:

…la clairière dite la Mauvaise Femme, près Diekirch, où il y a deux bas-reliefs énigmatiques représentant une femme qui a une tête et un homme qui n’en a pas…

…the clearing called “The Wicked Woman” near Diekirch, where there are two mysterious sculpted figures representing a woman with a head and a man without one…

It’s not all that close to Diekirch, and I think I’d say the headless figure is more likely to be female, but he’s clearly talking about the same place.

It’s not well signposted at all, but as long as you have the coordinates you will find it.

Raschpëtzer Qanat

The Raschpëtzer Qanat is a 600 metre long tunnel, built around 130 AD, which brought water from a spring on one side of the Petschend hill to a large Roman villa in the Alzette valley on the other side. It is an extraordinary feat of engineering. At least eighteen shafts were dug from the hillside down to the channel below. The mysterious pits on the hill were known about for centuries, but the water channel was only rediscovered in 1986.

One of them has been lit so that you can see all the way down to the water flowing at the bottom.

My cousin J lives in Luxembourg, close to the Qanat, and joined me for the trip. “I’ve lived in this country for ten years, we are less than ten minutes’ drive away, and I’d never been here before!”

There is a visitors’ gallery to the tunnels which is supposedly open only on Sunday afternoons; but we were lucky and found it open on a Tuesday.

From the top of the hill there is a lovely view of the towns of Heisdorf and Steinsel.

This is impressive engineering, and the best example of this sort of water management system north of the Alps, but in fact the emperor Claudius (remember him?) had set up a similar and much bigger structure to drain the waters of Lake Fucino in Italy about 80 years earlier (including what was the longest tunnel in the world, until 1871), and it is on record that this was repaired at almost exactly the same time that the Raschpëtzer Qanat was built, so the technology was available within the Roman Empire.

The Raschpëtzer Qanat is not very well signposted (a familiar refrain) from the car park, but if you use online resources you can find your way fairly quickly. A fellow rambler told us that there used to be more and better signs, so perhaps by the time you get there the situation will have improved again. And on such a warm day it was nice to spend so much time in the woods with their natural air conditioning.

Food and language

Always worth noting where I ate – you may want to follow suit. In Diekirch I had lunch at Niklos Eck, an unpretentious Luxembourgish eatery at 3 rue Nicolas Wathelet – actually on the square around the corner from St Laurence’s Church and the museum. The lentil and sausage salad was yummy and kept me going all afternoon. It doesn’t have a website, you’ll just have to show up and hope for the best.

For dinner, J. took me to Um Eck in Hostert, which apparently has upgraded significantly in the most recent period and did a rather good seafood platter – the calamari were a bit chewy but that’s tricky to get right for the first customers of the evening, and the rest was very yummy.

Everyone speaks French and German in Luxembourg, and most people speak English; and if your German is good enough you can catch most of what is written or spoken in Luxembourgish as well. It’s one of those situations where making all the languages official and legal has taken the sting out of the cultural issue.

So, I don’t think I need to go back to Luxembourg for the sake of the antiquities, but I am glad I went. (And it’s always nice to spend time with J.)