This pastoral trail offers an enchanting walk among forests, lakes, grasslands and ponds which the monks worked on with great fevrour over the centuries. The Mont-Dieu charterhouse, the imprint of the Cistercians at Elan and at Chatel-Chehery, and the XIIIth century Gothic abbey church of Mouzon built by the Benedictines are among the opportunities to explore the monastic world in the Ardennes.
The forest of Belval and its parkland recall the mythical setting in which the abbeys were established. Most of the great Ardennes monastries were founded in the XIIth century and rebuilt in the XVIIth and XVIIIth, before the monks were expelled for all time during the French Revolution.
