The Soignies region is the historic heart of Belgian pierre bleue production — a dense blue-grey limestone that has been quarried here since the Middle Ages and used in buildings across the country. Look at any grand civic building, cathedral floor, or cemetery in Belgium and there is a reasonable chance the stone came from within a few kilometres of where you are standing.
The active quarries north and west of town are not tourist sites, but the landscape they have shaped — stepped escarpments, wide flat-bottomed cuts in the fields, workshops edged with offcuts — is striking and entirely unlike anything else in the Walloon countryside. Walking or cycling the lanes around the quarry district gives a sense of the industrial weight behind the town's quiet surface.