Durbuy

Small town on the river Ourthe in the Belgian Ardennes; see Belgium (Literary).

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
Neither Here Nor There	Bill Bryson	journey waypoint	Where Bryson’s Ardennes walk ends on a sprained ankle, in a fairy-tale town he barely gets to explore.

Neither Here Nor There — Bill Bryson (1991)

Source: Readwise highlight

So I had a limping look round Durbuy. It was exceptionally pretty and pleasant, with narrow back streets and houses built of stone beneath slate roofs.

• Role: journey waypoint
• In the book: End of chapter 6. Bryson walks from Barvaux to Durbuy, hurts his ankle on the way down into town, and recovers over a Coke before limping round. He describes a chateau “lifted wholesale from a fairy tale”, the racing Ourthe beneath it, and green hills “that for centuries had kept the outside world outside”. He then limps back to Barvaux’s dark, unstaffed station, which sets off a memory of the diner in his Iowa hometown.
• Why it matters: It’s the quiet close of his Belgian Ardennes stretch, the one rural interlude between Brussels and the German cities. The town’s prettiness matters less than its isolation: it sets up the lonely-station scene at Barvaux.