The bordermarkers of the Pyrenees : about me
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Perhaps you're interested in some personal background.

The start
I was born in 1957, live in Eindhoven (the Netherlands) and I am a retired psychiatric nurse. In 1992 I got the idea of walking along the Dutch-Belgian border with the search for every bordermarker rather being a means than a goal. Inviting friends to join me, it became a memorable friendship-project. Also the start of a passion which brought me finally to the esfr-border.

The fun
Searching bordermarkers is a wonderful way of walking and discovering. You need to find your own route, it takes you to places hardly visited, the border provides often a quiet & green scenery and the goal of finding every bordermarker gives a collector's drive. There are many memories I cheerish of beautiful and distant places I visited. Also of the friendship when trips were undertaken together and - of course - of the thrill of finding an unfindable bordermarker.
And it made me interested in the bordermarkers themselves: their origin, their history, their morphology and their aesthetics.  They are cultural-historical monuments, worthy of preserving and documenting.

The internet
The internet is a poor man's publishing house and a tremendous meeting point. In 1998 I launched a website on the Dutch bordermarkers (www.grenspalen.nl), one of the first on this subject. It raised interest and led to interviews in magazines and on tv. Nowadays a lot more people in Holland are searching for bordermarkeres and the dutch 'bordermarker-scene' is a vivid community.

The Pyrenees
My first visit to the Pyrenees was in 1986.  Followed in 1998 and succeeding years by walking the GR10-trail.  Jan-Willem Doomen was my first companion on that trail and he returned in later years to join me on bordermarker-hikes.
Some parts of the GR10 includes bordermarkers and they were the first to photograph. The tripoints of Andorra were visited in 2001 and 2004.  'Doing' all the Pyrenean bordermarkers seemed too ambitious to consider but the bordermarkers of Llivia were done in 2002-2005.

This project
In 2003 I was interviewed by a French journalist (see this article) and I told about my dream to find all the esfr-bordermarkers.  Though I continued to accumulate my 'collection' in later years, I realized that I needed more time and drive to do them all.  And there was another idea: designing my own walking trail along the bordermarkers: the GRPdesBF. The final drive came upon me in 2008 in Peru: see this page.

The future
In - let's say - 2025, my project will be completed. And then? Well, I think I'll end my bordermarker-career in the Pyrenees on - I hope - a very advanced age.  These mountains offer enough for a lifetime of walking and undigging border-history. And bordermarkers themselves keep changing: they weather, tumble  down, get damaged or disappear. There will allways be a reason for some bordermarker-trip.