Mortehan is a sleepy village of grey slate houses located in a bend in the River Semois.
It lies in the south of Luxembourg province. A long way from Brussels. A long way from anywhere. It feels as if nothing has changed in a hundred years.
Its old churchyard stands in a grassy meadow where flowers grow wild and stray chickens peck around the gravestones. Most of the graves in this quiet spot date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The names of the people who once lived here have been eroded by the Ardennes rain, lost forever. But that just adds to the romance of this abandoned spot.
The woods around Mortehan are dark, mysterious places with moss growing up the trees. It doesn’t look like Belgium. More like an old German fairy tale.
Derek Blyth’s hidden secret of the day: Derek Blyth is the author of the bestselling “The 500 Hidden Secrets of Belgium”. He picks out one of his favourite hidden secrets for The Brussels Times every day.
