Hautmont

Hautmont, on a bend of the Sambre in the far north, has spent thirteen centuries alternating between prayer and fire. An abbey founded here in the seventh century made the town: Benedictine Hautmont grew around its monastery, and the abbey's later buildings still stand near the river, the dignified survivors of the Revolution that dissolved the community. Then the nineteenth century brought the second vocation — iron. The Sambre valley became one of France's forges, and Hautmont rolled, cast and hammered metal for generations, a town of furnaces where the abbey bells had rung.

The industrial decades left their mark in workers' brick streets and in a certain northern steadiness of character, tested most recently by the tornado of 2008, which tore through the town and was answered — in the regional manner — by rebuilding. The Sambre itself, canalised and calm, has been rediscovered as a pleasure waterway, and the towpaths now carry cyclists where barges once queued for the mills.

Cultural life gathers at the Centre culturel, the municipal stage that hosts the concerts, theatre and community seasons of a town this size — and hosts them, the record shows, for international visitors as well as local ones. Hautmont is not on the tourist trail, and does not pretend to be; it is the France of the working north, abbey-founded and forge-tempered, which has its own quiet claim on a traveller's attention.