Bergues: Vauban's Water-Ringed Town and the Belfry of the Ch'tis

Required Activities

• Be on the square on a Monday morning while the market is on and hear the carillon of 50 bells ring for it — and find out which of them are the 17th and 18th-century bells pulled out of the rubble after the belfry was blown up in 1944

• Find an old photograph or engraving of the belfry before 1944 — 47 m of yellow sand brick with each face panelled in tiers of blind Gothic arcading — and set it against the shorter, plainer tower in front of you, which the town had to accept to get anything rebuilt at all

• Walk the Vauban enceinte from gate to gate — Cassel, Hondschoote, Dunkerque, Bierne — find the sun of Louis XIV carved on the south gate, work out where the sluices let the water into the marsh around the town, as they did in 1573, 1646 and 1793, and finish at the only pieces left of the abbey of Saint-Winoc: the marble gate, the square tower and the Pointed tower, which collapsed in 1812 and was rebuilt from its own stones

• Stand below the belfry at the spot where Antoine Bailleul — the postman and carillonneur played by Dany Boon — hung the sheet reading « Annabelle Je t'm épouse moi biloute » over the parapet to propose, and work out from where in the town the lettering would have been readable

• In the museum in the old Mont-de-Piété, built to Wenceslas Cobergher's plans, find Georges de La Tour's Vielleur au chien and look at the two pairs of eyes in it — the blind player's shut, the little dog's bright and turned on you; until 1958 the picture was catalogued here as a Carracci, a Caravaggio, a Zurbarán and a Ribera in turn