GR 571 Stage 3: Stoumont to Trois-Ponts via Coo

GR 571 Stage 3 includes a neo-medieval castle, the ghosts of Peiper’s panzers, Belgium’s tallest waterfall, and a very steep climb. UPDATED APRIL 2026

Route at a glance

• Distance: 17 km
• Elevation gain: Approx. 480 m, including a very steep final climb above Coo after lunch
• Duration: 5-6.5 hours walking time
• Difficulty: Moderate to hard. Manageable terrain for much of the day with one seriously demanding ascent at Coo
• Start: Stoumont village (accommodation required from Stage 2; no railway access)
• End: Trois-Ponts railway station (Liège-Luxembourg line)
• Train home: Trois-Ponts to Liège, then onward connections to Brussels, Leuven, Namur. Timetables: belgiantrain.be
• Key landmarks: Château de Froidcourt, Monceau village, La Gleize viewpoint, Coo waterfall, Coo chair-lift and watchtower, Trois-Ponts
• Best season: April to October. The high-ridge section above Coo is very exposed and can be bleak in winter
• GPX / map: RouteYou, Wikiloc (search GR 571 Stage 3). Topo-guide from grsentiers.org

GR 571 Stage 3: History at every bend

Stage 3 of the GR 571 is the one that surprised me most. On paper it looks like the shorter, more straightforward middle leg between the hard overnight push of Stage 2 and the river-valley beauty of Stage 4. In reality it is something richer. It’s a stage where the landscape and the history are so tightly wound together that you cannot look at a field, a ruined wall, or a bend in the Amblève without wondering what happened here in December 1944.

The route begins at Stoumont, a name that will be familiar to any student of the Battle of the Bulge. It passes through Monceau and above La Gleize, both of them ground-zero for Kampfgruppe Peiper’s advance and its destruction. It descends to Coo, a village of waterfalls, a chair-lift, and restaurants, before climbing again in what I found to be a lung-busting ascent. And it ends at Trois-Ponts, where a handful of American combat engineers changed the course of the battle by blowing up a bridge.

I walked it in late March, the morning after my overnight at Maggy’s in Stoumont, fortified by a packed lunch and still feeling my sore calves from the previous day’s Chefna climb. By Coo my legs had found their rhythm. By the top of the watchtower hill they were reminding me firmly of their presence!

It is, as one of my fellow walkers later told me, probably the most beautiful stage you can walk in Belgium.

Getting there and getting home

GR 571 Stage 3 starts from Stoumont, which has no railway station. You may be arriving from Stage 2 having spent the night locally. The stage ends at Trois-Ponts, which does have a railway station on the Liège-Luxembourg line, making the return journey easy and giving the stage a satisfying shape: begin in a village deep in the Ardennes, and end at a railway station.

Trois-Ponts to Liège takes around 40 minutes; connections to Brussels, Leuven, and Namur are straightforward from Liège-Guillemins. Check timetables at belgiantrain.be before you walk.

Trois-Ponts has guesthouses and B&Bs well suited to walkers, and the surrounding village of Coo offers further options.

The walk: Stoumont to Trois-Ponts

Out of Stoumont: The Château de Froidcourt

You’ll leave Stoumont village in the early morning quiet, heading roughly south and west along the hillside above the Amblève. Within the first kilometre, something large and turreted appears between the trees: the Château de Froidcourt, standing on the ridge above the valley with the confident authority of a structure that has been here since the medieval period.

Except that it hasn’t, quite. The castle looks like it dates from the fourteenth century with its towers, battlements, a properly imposing façade. In fact it was built in neo-medieval style between 1912 and 1919 by Charles-Albert de Harenne, the mayor of Stoumont, on the site of a genuine medieval fortification whose ruins are still visible just to the north of the main building.

The original castle, seat of the seigneurie de Froidcourt, belonged to the powerful De La Marck family before passing to the counts of Lynden, who held it from the sixteenth century until the French Revolution. The De Harenne family acquired it in the nineteenth century and still owns it today; the current owner, François de Harenne, has opened part of the property as a guesthouse and tower suite. The family also navigated the Second World War on this ridge: a story told in the owner’s own account of the château and its wartime experience.

The castle cannot be visited inside, but the exterior is striking as you pass below it on the GR, and the view from the ridge across the Amblève valley is exactly what you’d expect from a site chosen by medieval lords for strategic dominance.

Monceau: A village and a battle

The path descends towards the river and passes through the hamlet of Monceau. It’s small, quiet, and easy to walk through without registering. But the information panels beside the road tell a different story about what this particular bend in the valley witnessed in December 1944.

Monceau sits on the south bank of the Amblève, directly across from Cheneux and La Gleize. These were the villages where Kampfgruppe Peiper made his last stand. When the 82nd Airborne Division cleared Cheneux on the evening of 21 December 1944, forcing Peiper’s SS forces back across the river, it was the 3rd Battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment that pushed the Germans out of Monceau simultaneously and established defensive positions on the south bank. The placards in the village mark where these events unfolded on ground you can now walk across in five minutes.

The long ridge: Views to La Gleize

After Monceau the path climbs again. This is the GR 571’s characteristic rhythm: down to the river, up to the ridge, views, descent, repeat. From here, on a clear day, you can see across to La Gleize, sitting on its saddle of hillside above the Amblève. The views across the valley are stunning.

La Gleize is less than three kilometres as the crow flies. In December 1944, by the time Peiper’s surrounded force had been reduced to a perimeter of less than two square kilometres around that village, those crows would have been flying over a landscape of burning tanks, constant shellfire, and American assault columns closing from every direction. Today it is silent and forested. The contrast is difficult to hold in the mind simultaneously, and perhaps that is the point of walking rather than reading: you feel the ground, and the ground keeps its secrets.

Descent to Coo: Waterfall and village

The path descends from the ridge through the Coo reservoir and its hydroelectric power station. It’s a functional, elegantly integrated piece of modern engineering that generates power by pumping water uphill at night using cheap electricity and releasing it through turbines during peak demand. The reservoir sits calm between wooded slopes; the whole structure is less intrusive than you might expect.

And then Coo. The village is small and has no particular reason to be busy, except that it has, as I discovered, not two but three significant attractions. The Coo waterfalls are first: a 15-metre double cascade that counts as Belgium’s largest waterfall by volume, dropping over a ledge of exposed rock with considerable drama. Second: the Plopsa Coo theme park, which explains the density of restaurants around a settlement of perhaps a few hundred permanent residents. Third: a chair-lift ascending 220 metres above the village to a watchtower on the hilltop. When I visited in late March, it was sitting idle waiting for the season to start.

I ate my packed lunch at Coo. One of the village’s restaurateurs greeted me without excessive enthusiasm, given that I was not going to be ordering from his menu. A walker with a packed lunch is not the target demographic for a village built around waterfalls and a theme park. No matter. The waterfall is genuinely impressive, and the 19th-century print of it I found later is even more so: an angler perched in a rather precarious position on the rocks below.

The climb: Stairway to heaven

The GR 571 does not take the chair-lift. This will not surprise you. What the route does instead is follow an almost vertical climb up the wooded hillside beside the chair-lift, gaining 220 metres in a remarkably short horizontal distance. There are steps cut into the slope in the steepest sections. There are also tree roots, loose stones, and the psychological difficulty of looking up through the trees and seeing no obvious end to it.

I had extremely sore calves for several days afterwards. But I don’t regret a single step.

From the top of the chair-lift the path continues to the watchtower at the summit. It’s an observation platform with 360-degree views across the Ardennes.

On a grey late-March morning the landscape wasn’t clear, but I could see the Amblève valley below, the Hautes Fagnes plateau beyond, the forests rolling south towards Trois-Ponts and the Salm.

The descent to Trois-Ponts

After climbing so high, the path meanders gently downhill through the forests for the final kilometres to the town of Trois-Ponts,. Here, the Amblève meets the Salm at a river confluence that has been strategically significant for at least a thousand years. The descent is steady and quiet, a good place to let the morning’s climbs settle in the legs.

Trois-Ponts is the end of Stage 3 and the starting point for Stage 4. There is a railway station, a café, and the particular satisfaction of having walked from Stoumont to here by your own legs, through seventeen kilometres of some of the finest landscape Belgium has to offer.

The history along the way

Kampfgruppe Peiper: The battle that shaped this landscape

The names on the hillsides around Stage 3, such as Stoumont, Monceau, Cheneux and La Gleize, form a map of one of the most dramatic episodes in the Battle of the Bulge. Understanding what happened here in December 1944 transforms the walk from a pleasant route through forested hills into something considerably more haunting.

SS-Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper commanded the spearhead of the German 1st SS Panzer Division. This was an armoured battle group of nearly 5,800 men and over a hundred tanks, including the massive Tiger II. His mission was to drive at maximum speed to the Meuse River crossings at Huy, 100 kilometres to the northwest, as part of Hitler’s last great offensive on the Western Front. Speed was everything. The plan assumed that Peiper’s tanks would be refuelling from captured Allied fuel dumps long before they ran dry.

Peiper crossed the Amblève at Stavelot on 18 December 1944 and raced for the bridges at Trois-Ponts, where crossing the Salm would put him on the direct road west. He was too late. American combat engineers of the 51st Combat Engineer Battalion blew the Salm bridge as Peiper’s lead tanks rolled toward it. A second bridge was destroyed minutes later. Peiper was forced north, detoured through the villages of Cheneux and La Gleize, and spent the next five days trying to fight his way out of an increasingly tight pocket. In the meantime, American reinforcements (the 30th Infantry Division to his west and north, the 3rd Armored Division from the north, and the 82nd Airborne Division pressing from across the Amblève) were hemming him in.

The 82nd Airborne’s 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment attacked Cheneux on 20 December in fierce house-to-house fighting, suffering 225 casualties in one day. Monceau was cleared simultaneously by the regiment’s 3rd Battalion, pushing the Germans back across the river. By 22 December, the remnants of Peiper’s once-mighty Kampfgruppe were out of food and almost out of fuel. They were compressed into a perimeter of less than two square kilometres around La Gleize. Wounded Americans and Germans shared the cellars. A Luftwaffe resupply drop went badly wrong, with the supplies landing in American hands in Stoumont instead.

On Christmas Eve, Peiper ordered his remaining 800 men to abandon their vehicles and heavy weapons and break out on foot through the forest to the German lines. They left behind 28 heavy tanks, 70 half-tracks, and eight armoured cars. And over 4,000 of their original force were dead, wounded, or captured. The advance to the Meuse, which had seemed so unstoppable on 16 December, had ended in total failure on a hilltop above the Amblève.

The Coo waterfall: Made by monks

Belgium’s largest waterfall owes its current form not to pure geology but to a medieval mill. The monks of the Abbey of Stavelot, the great ecclesiastical power that shaped this entire region for over a thousand years, are credited with diverting a meander of the Amblève in the fifteenth century to feed a mill downstream of the natural falls. The diversion cut across a bend in the river, creating a steeper drop and a more dramatic cascade than had existed before. A mill recorded at the site as early as 1483 marks the beginning of that story.

By the early nineteenth century the falls had already become a tourist attraction. It was part of the ‘Amusements de Spa’ circuit that drew wealthy visitors from the spa town along a scenic tour of the surrounding Ardennes landscape. This was Belgian and European tourism in its earliest organised form, predating the railway by decades. The hydroelectric power station built at the foot of the hill in the twentieth century is a later addition. It is an energy-accumulation station that pumps water uphill overnight using off-peak electricity and releases it through turbines during the day.

Trois-Ponts: Three bridges and one crucial decision

The town’s name is as literal as Belgian place names get: Trois-Ponts means Three Bridges. The three bridges in question span the Amblève, the Salm, and the Lienne. These three rivers converge in a small area that made this a natural crossroads for centuries. The railway junction at Trois-Ponts historically connected the Vennbahn (the narrow-gauge line running through the high Ardennes towards Germany) with the Liège-Luxembourg main line that you will use to travel home.

In December 1944 this confluence made Trois-Ponts one of the most strategically vital points in the Battle of the Bulge. Whoever controlled the bridges here controlled the routes west. The decision by a small detachment of American engineers to blow those bridges as Peiper’s column arrived (sacrificing the infrastructure but denying the panzers their crossing) is widely credited with ending Peiper’s advance and with it the realistic possibility of the German offensive reaching the Meuse. The engineers of the 51st Combat Battalion held their nerve under fire, detonated their charges, and changed the outcome of the battle. A monument in the town commemorates their action.

The other stages of the GR 571

The GR 571 is a circular long-distance footpath covering approximately 165 km. You can read about some of the other stages here:

• Stage 1: Comblain-au-Pont to Aywaille
• Stage 2: Aywaille to Stoumont
• Stage 4: Trois-Ponts to Vielsalm
• Stage 5: Vielsalm to Gouvy
• Stage 6: Gouvy to Verleumont

A final note

The walk from Stoumont to Trois-Ponts is the stage where the GR 571 earns its subtitle: Vallées des Légendes, the Valleys of Legends. Every bend in the path has a story attached to it. Some medieval, some earlier, some from a winter barely eighty years ago. You pass a castle built to look ancient but dating from the same decade as the First World War. You walk through a hamlet where paratroopers fought house to house in the snow. You stand on a ridge and look at a village where 4,000 soldiers were lost in a week. And then you descend to a waterfall made by monks and climb a hill that puts an amusement park at your feet.

Walking friend Guido told me, after he walked this same stage a year later in better weather, that he thought the Amblève valley topped the Ourthe valley. I am not going to settle that argument here. But I know what he means.

Just a shame I didn’t see a peak of sunshine all day!

Denzil Walton

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.