Former village shop & pub

he house opposite the school, converted after 1918, was for a long time the village shop as well as village pub. As early as 1900, Grune was served by the local tram service that linked Marche to Martelange. At the time, the village boasted 4 grocers and two inns (family pensions) for a population of more than 600 villagers. Nowadays, the population is a little over 330…and there isn't a single shop in the village… A lot of the houses still bear traces of a barn door. The barns were used to store the hay and shelter the carts, which is why the doors are quite large. Many of the houses also have a small outbuilding - generally built near the road, away from the living quarters - that was used as a pigsty. The older constructions, mostly from the 19th or early 20th century, are built either with sandstone that was extracted from a quarry in the Bois de Grune (the Grune wood), half-timber work and cob, or in some cases, with the bricks that were baked in the old Harsin brick factory. Paradoxically, brick was at the time considered as a ‘noble’ material (some of the façades are made out of brick, while the back of the houses and the gables are in Belgian bluestone…).