It was a Sunday morning when I arrived at Maubeuge railway station, one of those half-awake Sunday mornings that make provincial France so seductive. I had brought some prejudices and preconceptions with me: this was the industrial north; smoke, I expected, factories, grimy industrial streets. I found nothing of the kind. The place was full of sunlight; flowers hung in pots; there was a smell of honeysuckle on the air, and the River Sambre ran through the centre of town, and pleasure boats were moored to its banks.

Two years before urging Modestine, the immortal donkey, across the Cevennes, Robert Louis Stevenson paddled a canoe from Maubeuge to Pont-oise, along the Sambre and the River Oise. I was all set to follow him along the towpaths on a mountain bike; so at nine that Monday morning, I coasted down a gravel slope and came to the canal.

The path was deserted; not a fisherman, not a barge. I passed under the walls of a dead factory or two, one pink, one in black and brown; industrial architecture whose sad, broken windows stared at me. But, in a while, the track widened and became covered with soft, springy grass. A lazy heron took off, grey against the green, haughty, an aristocrat of a bird.

At Hautmont, the towpath climbed to a bridge, and I was suddenly in the main street of a small town. A man was walking his dog, and three women came out of the baker's. "After Hautmont," wrote Stevenson, "we went through a delectable land, the river wound among low hills ... On either side were meadows and orchards, bordered with a margin of sedge and water flowers ..."

I bowled along, and all was a luminous green, and trees grew in beautiful shapes, and the cows made congregations in their shade. There were water meadows, more herons rising and the sun glittering through an early mist. "Everything was drenched in the scents of summer, the hedgerows were full of perfumes, the riverside meadows were full of the sweetness of new-mown hay."

At Sassegnies, the lock house was all flower-bedecked and, beside it, more flowers and the week's laundry were vying to be the brightest colours in the garden. In the surrounding fields, the poplars shimmered like distant steeples in a mirage. And there sat two ancient fishermen, "stupefied with pleasure", statues, saints in green niches, like figures on some magic clock made to register not time but contentment.

I was in the saddle the next day before the sun had risen much above the horizon. The waters of the Sambre were like smoke, the reflections of the trees faint and ghostly. Moorhens rushed to the far bank as I passed and the mist rolled in from the fields, dripping steadily from the trees, making a noise like half-hearted rain, all the way to Landrecies.

When Stevenson passed this way, it was only six years after the defeat of the French in the Franco-Prussian war, and Landrecies was a heavily defended garrison town. Now, there is little left of its military past, and even the extensive barracks are empty and silent. The barbed wire has rusted away and weeds have burst through the ground where conscripts once stamped their feet and shouldered arms.

I stopped there to visit the small supermarket, purchasing a picnic and half a bottle of wine -something of quality for a very special purpose. A mile farther on, I followed the towpath through a left-hand bend, and the tiled rooftops of the village of Ors came into sight. The chimes of midday echoed across the fields and I dismounted. I was standing on the long, straight stretch of canal where Wilfred Owen was killed.

Sitting on the bank, in the green shade by the green water, were two fishermen, quiet in an endless calm where shells and bullets and bodies and blood had been, and where one of our most gifted poets had lost his life, only a week before the armistice was signed. "It's a lot quieter here now," said one of the men, and gazed at his float where it stood steady in the still water.

The main alley of the village cemetery is lined with family tombs. At the far end from the gate stands a tall cross, and to the right of it are 62 plain white tombstones with the names of those who died at Ors, most of them on that same day -November 4, 1918. In the left-hand corner, three from the end, three red roses in bloom, lies Wilfred Owen, MC, dead at 25. Beyond the wall, an empty field stretched back to the village and its church. I was alone, so I read the poem I'd brought with me, With an Identity Disc, then poured the wine over the ground, into the grave.

But let my death be memoried on this disc.

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