“Castles, Coal and Canals: A Driving Tour of Hainaut” is my latest Voicemap audio tour. Discover five reasons why you might like to give it a go. Plus: a special free offer for ten readers!
Hainaut is one of Belgium’s most overlooked provinces. Wedged between Brussels and the French border, it tends to be passed through rather than paused in. This means that most visitors miss the castles rising above its fields, the industrial history embedded in its landscape, and the engineering achievements along its canals.
My new audio driving tour, “Castles, Coal and Canals” sets out to change that. Over 76 kilometres of Hainaut countryside, you’ll trace the province’s journey from medieval stronghold to aristocratic showpiece to industrial powerhouse. All is narrated in your ear as you drive, with GPS triggering each stop automatically.
Here are five reasons why this tour is worth your time.
1. Five castles: Five completely different stories
Most people picture a single image when they hear “castle tour”: grey stone, drawbridge, more of the same. This tour overturns that assumption with five castles that have almost nothing in common except their age.
The tour opens at Château de Seneffe, an 18th-century neoclassical estate built not by a nobleman but by a wealthy merchant who had turned military supply contracts into architectural ambition. It’s all grandeur and Enlightenment ideals: marble floors, formal gardens, and an orangery to impress the guests.
A few kilometres later, Château de Feluy pulls you straight back to the 14th century. Four round towers reflected in a still moat, a stone bridge where a drawbridge once stood, and walls that were built to stop armies rather than impress guests. It’s still a private residence, which only adds to the sense that you’ve stumbled across something.
The Château-Fort d’Écaussinnes-Lalaing is another contrast. Here you’ll find thick stone walls, a gated keep, and an authentic medieval atmosphere. The castle’s origins go back to the 12th century, and the ground floor still contains a medieval kitchen, dungeon, chapel, and armory that evoke its feudal past. Upper floors, added in the 17th-18th centuries, introduce later comforts.
Château d’Attre is an inhabited 18th-century home where original furniture, family portraits, and leather-bound books remain exactly where their owners left them. The English landscape garden, complete with an artificial rocky hill and a Swiss chalet built purely for pleasure, is one of the finest of its kind in Belgium.
And then there is Château d’Havré, a hauntingly beautiful ruin rescued from complete collapse by local volunteers. Each June, a rare historic rose garden blooms within its broken walls. The contrast between the fragile flowers and the crumbling stone is one of those images that stays with you.
2. The moment Belgium became the workshop of the world
Few people realise that Belgium was the first country on the European continent to industrialise. It was second only to Britain in 19th-century output, and a genuine industrial superpower in coal, steel, and engineering.
Hainaut was at the heart of it. The black seams running beneath these fields powered the forges and factories that made Belgium’s industrial revolution possible, and the Canal du Centre – a UNESCO World Heritage waterway – carried millions of tonnes of coal northward to Antwerp and the world beyond.
The tour weaves this story into the landscape as you drive, so that the countryside stops looking like fields and starts looking like evidence. By the time you reach the end of the route, you’ll have a fundamentally different understanding of how Belgium became what it is.
3. A 100-metre tower that lifts barges like toys
The Castles, Coal and Canals tour ends at the Strépy-Thieu Boat Lift, and nothing quite prepares you for it.
Standing 100 metres tall, this concrete tower raises fully loaded barges 73 metres between canal levels. Watching a vessel the size of a small bungalow being hoisted silently through the air is the kind of thing that makes you laugh out loud with surprise. Just a short distance away, the four original hydraulic boat lifts of the historic Canal du Centre offer an equally remarkable contrast: Victorian engineering at its most elegant, still intact and perfectly preserved.
Together, these two engineering landmarks tell a story that spans more than a century of Belgian ingenuity. It is a fittingly spectacular way to end the tour.
4. A 90-minute drive, or a full day out
One of the great advantages of an audio driving tour is that it fits around you, not the other way around.
If you simply want to drive the route without stopping, the tour takes around 90 minutes. But the tour is designed to reward those who linger. When open, you can step inside Château de Seneffe’s state rooms. Walk the gardens at Attre or Havré. Climb the ramparts at Écaussinnes-Lalaing. Stop for lunch at the taverne on the Grand Place in Écaussinnes.
Take the day. The province is best appreciated slowly, and the VoiceMap app lets you pause, resume, and return to any point on the route as many times as you like. The tour is yours to use at your own pace, on your own terms.
The Castles, Coal and Canals tour is ideal between April and October, when castle interiors and gardens are open. Spring and early summer are particularly beautiful, with the roses at Havré in bloom and the countryside at its greenest.
5. The stories behind the stones
You can drive past a castle without an audio tour. You can read a sign, glance at the towers, and move on. What you can’t do without a guide is understand why the towers at Château de Feluy are round rather than square. Or what that single architectural choice tells you about the realities of medieval warfare.
This tour is built around those moments of explanation. The kind where a detail you’ve walked past a hundred times suddenly makes sense, and the landscape around you shifts from scenery to story.
The tour also touches on Belgium’s linguistic geography: why the same towns carry entirely different names in French and Dutch, and what that quiet cultural fault line reveals about the country’s identity. It is the kind of context that makes Belgium legible in a way that no guidebook quite manages.
With 60 audio stops across 76 kilometres, there is a great deal to discover. But the aim throughout is never to overwhelm; it is to make you see what you might otherwise have missed.
Ready to explore Hainaut?
The tour is available now on VoiceMap for €10.49. You can preview the route, read the stop descriptions, and purchase directly at the link below. Once purchased, it is yours to use as many times as you like – in the car, or at home in virtual mode, like a podcast.
Castles, Coal and Canals: A Driving Tour of Hainaut: Available on VoiceMap.
Free Offer!
A small gift for Discovering Belgium readers: I have ten free voucher codes for Castles, Coal and Canals to give away. If you’d like to do the tour at no cost, simply get in touch and I’ll send one your way: first come, first served.
Hainaut has been waiting for you. It’s time to go.
I created Discovering Belgium in 2011 to share the country’s hidden stories, fascinating places, and remarkable people. Through articles, photography, and audio walks, I share discoveries that reveal Belgium beyond the obvious. Hope you enjoy this site.
Cool stuff there, love the idea of the audio drive trip!