Carrière des Nerviens Regional Nature Reserve, Regional nature reserve in Bavay and Saint-Waast, France

The Carrière des Nerviens is a 3.11-hectare regional nature reserve in the valley of the Ruisseau de Bavay, shared by Bavay and Saint-Waast. Its triangular site is an old Famennian sandstone quarry backfilled with marl from Bellignies between 1971 and 1978. Tall grasses and upright herbaceous stems with small white and yellow flower heads now cover the ground, with umbrella-shaped stalks rising above them and a line of leafy trees behind.

The quarry was worked from the late nineteenth century by Chevallier & Cie, which employed about 70 workers, 25 of them miners; in 1909 it produced 12,000 cubic metres of macadam, 500 of ballast and 25,000 of cobblestones. Blocks were split with a steel hammer called refenderesse, then sorted by eye. Extraction ceased in 1962–1965 when the stone was no longer good enough, and between 1971 and 1978 the pit was filled with marl from the Bellignies quarry.

The reserve is managed by the CPIE Bocage de l'Avesnois, which organises regular work parties to stop the site being colonised by woodland and to remove invasive plants such as Japanese knotweed. It also runs education and interpretation sessions on the local heritage, and volunteers help record the flora and fauna. The site is named after the Nerviens, the Gallic people whose capital was at Bavay.

The reserve is triangular, bordered by the D942 road to the south, an unused railtrack to the north-east and the Chemin de Rametz to the west, about 1 km west of Bavay town centre. It is supplied only by rainwater held in the marl, so the ground can be soft; the mound of debris rises about 6 m above the Chemin de Rametz.

The quarry's stone was split by hand: workers drilled boreholes manually and divided blocks with a 14-kilogram steel hammer called a refenderesse, then trimmed the edges to shape cobblestones. In 1909 the Chevallier & Cie quarry employed about 70 workers, 25 of them miners, and produced 12,000 cubic metres of macadam a year.