The Meuse is a 925-kilometre river – allegedly the oldest in the world – which rises in France, flows through Belgium and the Netherlands, and materialises parts of the border between the last two countries. It then drains into the North Sea in the extensive Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt delta. Particularly in the Netherlands, the river has been subject to damming and canalising: processes that will remain imperative in the coming decades, given the increased risk of serious winter flooding.

The soil in the Meuse basin contains minerals, stones and fossils from nearly every geological era, from the Cambrian to the Quaternary Period, brought along from higher areas in northern France, under the influence of frost erosion, chemical weathering and root pressure. The current propelled these masses of material, in a process that took thousands and thousands of years, like a liquid bulldozer, extremely slow but extremely persistent too. It is this ancient rubble that is responsible for the erratic course of the Meuse: the river was more or less forced to work its way through all of the ballast it could no longer carry.