The story about a Belgian farmer accidentally (or was it?) moving a stone on his property that happened to mark the border with France has been reported by many news outlets. I guess it is seen as a fun little break with the grinding bad news of the pandemic.
The farmer in question moved the 200-year old stone marker because he was fed up of it getting in the way of his ploughing, and in the process he moved the Belgian border 2.2 metres further into French territory. His actions were outed, even though this was in "a really isolated spot" where "almost no-one passes by", and apparently he was told to move it back.
Setting aside that it seems very unlikely to me that, in this digital day and age, the stone is actually the legal marker of the border, what struck me was the fact that there is "a sharp-eyed group of Frenchmen, who for the past few years have wandered the countryside of their local area in northern France, following the border and checking each marker they encountered against a map showing the stones' original locations".
Say, what? Who are these shadowy individuals? And why do they have nothing better to do than to check the locations of border stones against a map? That, and the fact that someone actually cares that the border is two metres wrong...
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