If you are interested in horses, and particularly huge draft horses, then a visit to the Belgian Draft Horse Museum in Vollezele may interest you. Vollezele is only a tiny village in between Halle and Geraardsbergen. Yet from the 1880s until the 1930s Vollezele was bustling with activity and was indispensable to the nation’s economic success. In the 1850s, realising that the industrialisation of Europe would require stronger horses to pull increasingly heavier machinery, horse-breeder Remi Vander Schueren started to interbreed the three types of draft horse existing in Belgium. The result was a single breed which he named the Belgian draft horse. Continue reading →