Photo of the Week 45 – ‘de Vesten’ in Winter

When I think of Winter one of my shots stands out above all others, this one in fact. It was also taken at the very end of December, all-be-it back in 2001, so it seemed appropriate for this week’s photo of the week. Unfortunately the photo quality is very poor, which is the main reason I haven’t used it as a photo of the week before. It was shot on a second hand and fairly early digital camera, and the memory card I had for it was far too small, so I used it at a very low quality setting. Because of this the image is small, and has a lot of JPEG artifacting, but I absolutely love it all-the-same.

This shot was taken in the town of Lier, in the province of Antwerp in Belgium. Lier is a very unusual place, it’s absolutely brimming with canals and waterways, a lot like Brugge in fact, but much less well know. Historically it was also an enclosed town, and the remains of that enclosure are what are referred to as ‘de Vesten van Lier’ in Flemish, and it’s on the south eastern region of this enclosure that this photo was taken. The ‘Vesten’ were once the city walls, but they were knocked a few centuries ago and became a long thin park completely surrounding the town.

Lier sits at the point where two important Flemish rivers, the Kleine Nete and the Grote Nete, merge into a single even more important river, the Nete. The two rivers meet at the north of the town, and the joint river snakes around the eastern side of the town. In order to protect the town from flooding, a canal was dug around the western side of the town connecting the Kleine Nete to the Nete, this means the town is completely enclosed by water. On top of this the entire interior of the town is criss-crossed by canals so there is water just about everywhere you look in Lier.

on Flickr – Full-Size

Unfortunately the EXIF data has gotten lost from this file so all I can say is that I shot it with a FujiFilm MX-2700 point-and-shoot.