You may think that Belgium is no more than a short and tedious motorway journey to somewhere more interesting. You are wrong.We are in the depths of August and the European institutions are slumbering. Some European bars close for August. I am on holiday, too, and I tend – in whatever country – to look out for signs of lawyers. I have come on from the American Bar meeting in Chicago to New Mexico, and was walking around Taos when I saw the quaintest court building in the main plaza. It is low and made of adobe and, although built only in 1932, is already a US-listed monument.

I can offer you a similar holiday treat if you are passing this summer by car through my adopted country, Belgium, as many British holidaymakers do. Here is something beautiful to do as a break in your journey – and with a strong legal link. The key to Belgium’s treasures is that they are hidden, and this legal surprise is certainly that.

Set your GPS, or consult the map, for Mechelen. Many motorway passages through Belgium hit the Brussels ring road anyway. As you negotiate the ring, take the E19 in the direction of Antwerp, and head for Mechelen, just a few minutes and about 20km away. You are making for Flemish territory. (Be careful that you don’t head for Machelen: that is somewhere else altogether.) When you arrive, drive to the centre, park, and walk to Keizerstraat.

Mechelen, known to the French as Malines, used to be the capital of the Low Countries. In Keizerstraat, you will find two palaces over the road from each other, each built and occupied by a powerful woman. They had a step-grandmother-granddaughter relationship, and were both called Margaret (is there something about women called Margaret and power?). One was English, Margaret of York, sister to Kings Edward lV and Richard lll. But it is not her palace you should visit. Go over the road to what is now 20 Keizerstraat, and enter the palace of Margaret of Austria, through an unremarkable green door.

Inside is a walled Renaissance garden, protected from the tumult of modern life outside. The walls are a mixture of buff stone and tiny red bricks, and are part of the former palace, which was begun in 1507. There are benches under pillared arcades on which to sit and contemplate. The garden’s formality gives it serenity and restfulness. The same shapes are repeated in low box hedges, with each shape containing a conical tree and a circular bush. There are hardly any visitors. You can spend half an hour, and restore the place that beauty should hold in a well-lived life.

And the link with the law? Well, Margaret of Austria was governor of the Habsburg Netherlands (1507-1515 and again afterwards) and guardian of the future Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. The palace – once princes of state and church had moved out, and it was no longer used as the seat of the Great Council of the Netherlands – has been a Court of Law since 1796, continuing today. More than that, along one side of the garden, the Mechelen Bar has its premises. I defy anyone to find a law court or bar more beautifully situated.

There is another reason to visit Mechelen: that is, to become acquainted with the lovely Belgian painter, Rik Wouters, who was born here in 1882. If he received the recognition he deserves, he would be the 10th in my list of Ten Famous Belgians, as a single representative of modern Belgian painters not well known outside Belgium (such as Paul Delvaux, James Ensor and Léon Spilliaert). But Ten Famous Belgians is for another occasion.