Hoegaarden is a white beer for most of us, and a small town near Tienen for some of us; it is the home of my daughter’s secret boyfriend. I also discovered, via the Megalithic Portal site, that it has a potential menhir, standing by the river of a side street. There is very little detail available about this stone (some mutter darkly that it’s a deliberate imitation of the Pierre de Brunehaut, the largest menhir in Belgium). The Megalithic Portal site says that it was “found at the end of the 1990’s, a bit further down the road, near the river where it was lying flat. Hardly documented so far, and little known. Its overall shape and type of stone are common characteristics of several menhirs found in the region.” There used to be a much bigger megalith in the neighbourhood, but it is long gone.

So I went to see it with B. It was a cold day and she was not prepared to give me a smile, but she gives the stone a sense of scale.

As Spın̈al Tap almost put it,

No one knows who they were or what they were doing
But their legacy remains
Hewn into the living rock…
Of Hoegaarden

We stopped off to visit B’s secret boyfriend as well. He got a bit of a smile.