Tour of the Abbey Forest from Ossendrecht

Your route starts at Grenshotel/Restaurant De Jonckheer in Ossendrecht. Here you walk on the Brabantse Wal, a moraine that was created during the last Ice Age, 15 to 10,000 years ago. The edge of the sand plateau extends from the Belgian border to Steenbergen and reaches a height of up to 20 meters. Further on you walk into the Abbey woods, which are thirty meters higher than the Noordpolder. In this forest you will find Austrian pine, birch and elder. The Volksabdij was built just before the Second World War by unemployed young people from the area. The buildings functioned as a hospital, school and boarding school. In the courtyard you will see a statue by Omer Gielliet - made from a 200-year-old beech - that represents the ancestral mother Mary and the ancestral father Franciscus.