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Montigny-le-Tilleul (Municipality, Province of Hainaut, Belgium)

Municipal flag of Montigny-le-Tilleul - Image by Arnaud Leroy, 1 November 2006

Presentation of Montignies-le-Tilleul and Landelies
Municipal flag of Montigny-le-Tilleul
Yacht Club de la Haute Sambre

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Presentation of Montignies-le-Tilleul and Landelies

The municipality of Montigny-le-Tilleul (10,215 inhabitants on 1 January 2007; 1,526 ha) is located 10 km south-west of Charleroi. The municipality of Montigny-le-Tilleul is made since 1976 of the former municipalities of Montignies-le-Tilleul (note the spelling) and Landelies. The municipality is part of the "green belt" of Charleroi.

Montigny-le-Tilleul is limited by the rivers Sambre (west) and Eau d'Heure (east). The name of the village refers to the old linden (in French, tilleul) planted near the former Wilmet castle, today the town hall. Montigny already belonged to the Principality of Liège in the upper Middle Ages. The village was divided into two domains: the biggest one was the domain of Montigny, which belonged to the lordship of Marchienne in the XIII-XVth centuries and was transferred to Guillaume of Celles in 1620-1625 and again to the abbey of Aulne in 1746, whereas the smallest one, the domain of Bomerée was merged in the XVIIth century with the domain of Landelies and remained in the hands of the Looz-Coswaren lineage until the French Revolution.
Montigny was crossed by the road Charleroi-Mons (there was even no other road between the two towns until 1666); during the Flanders War (1691), the troops commanded by Duke of Luxembourg used the road. Being located closed to the fortress of Charleroi, Montigny was often a battle place; the village was occupied by the French during Louis XIV's wars.
Montigny is the birth place of the poet and novelist Jules Sottiaux, known as the Cantor of Wallonia.

Landelies, already mentioned in the Polyptich of the abbey of Lobbes (IXth century), also belonged to the Principality of Liège. The domain belonged to the Morialmé family and then to the Corswarem, who kept it until the French Revolution. Until the middle of the XIXth century, Landelies mostly lived from agriculture and stone extraction. In 1821, Jacques-Aubin Dolbeau, a French soldier who had survived the Waterloo battle, noticed the white limestone banks of Landelies and rented a piece of land from the municipality, where he opened the Saint-Louis quarry. In 1829, the canalization of the Sambre allowed an easier transport of the stones to the factories of the basin of Charleroi. Around 1855, Dolbeau was succeeded by Jules Frézon, who set up a grinding mill upon the request of the glassworkers of the region. A second quarry was exploited by Wargny in 1874; when he retired in 1921, the company Calcaires de la Sambre SA was founded. Fifty years later, the two quarries were merged into a single company, which produces 400,000 tons of stone per year.
Landelies has recently revived the local festival called Ducasse d'Jean. In the past, the villagers walked through the field plots with a dummy called Jean, trampled the potato fields which had not been harvested yet, and eventually burned Jean. The revived festival, set up in 1974, has dropped the trampling.
The village is also famous for the pass of Landelies (Col de Landelies), which separates the valleys of Sambre and Eau d'Heure at the scaring elevation of 177 m, and rock climbing, which can be done in abandoned quarries.

Sources:

Ivan Sache, 1 November 2006

Municipal flag of Montigny-le-Tilleul

The municipal flag of Montigny-le-Tilleul is horizontally divided yellow-blue-white-purple.
According to Armoiries communales en Belgique. Communes wallonnes, bruxelloises et germanophones, the flag was proposed by the Heraldry and Vexillology Council of the French Community, as "a combination of the traditional colours of Landelies and Montignies-le-Tilleul".

Arnaud Leroy, Pascal Vagnat & Ivan Sache, 1 November 2006

Yacht Club de la Haute Sambre

Burgee of YCHS (left) and detail (right, stretched to symmetry) - Images by António Martins, 13 August 2007

Yacht Club de la Haute Sambre (YCHS), founded in 1985, is based at Landelies. It is dedicated to motor yachting on inland waterways.

The burgee portrayed on the club emblem does not seem to be really used, rather the entire emblem is placed on a white pennant. The emblem, consisting of a diagonaly placed anchor in front of which is shown a burgee bearing the stylized letters YCHS, is put near the hoist and interrupts two parallel horizontal lines. Whereas the emblem is certainly rendered in blue, the stripes appear to be black.

Source: YCHS website

Jan Mertens, 18 February 2007