ANGELA BIRD'S
Northern France
What to do and see within 90 minutes of Calais

NORTHERN FRANCE – VIEWED FROM EUROSTAR

EUROSTAR: CALAIS TO LILLE

To make your Eurostar journey more interesting, here are a few pointers about
what you are passing as you hurtle through the seemingly
featureless countryside of this bit of Northern France.
This is a a tantalising glimpse of the interesting features that await you when
you have time to return by car on another occasion,
for a more thorough exploration of this fascinating region.

The first thing you spy from the windows on the north side of the train, is likely to be a distant view of the belfry of Calais. Top-heavy, with a slender pointed roof, it resembles a toadstool more than anything.

Photograph Calais belfry, with
Rodin figures. Photograph: Angela Bird

As the Eurostar builds up speed again, you will notice woodland. You are passing through the Forest of Guines, and almost alongside the site where two intrepid aeronauts landed in 1785 after accomplishing the first Channel crossing by air – in a hot-air balloon. Sadly, the train passes through a cutting just here, so you do not have a chance to see the Colonne Blanchard – a monument that commemorates the extraordinary deed.

Nor, alas, will you have a glimpse of the site of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, which lies to the south-east of Guines. Just north of the train’s route, mid-way between Guines and Ardres, is the plain where the French king Francis I and the English monarch Henry VIII met in 1520 and set about dazzling one another while parleying about a possible military alliance against the all-powerful “Charles Quint” – the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Charles V.

With a curve to the north, the train skirts another forest – this time that of Eperlecques. Hidden among the trees – and invisible from the train – is a vast blockhouse begun in 1942 by Hitler for the launching of V2 rockets on London. Thousands of slave-workers laboured to build it –but before it was finished the RAF bombed it intensively, reducing its function to a factory for liquid oxygen rather than the launch site that was planned.

Eperlecques blockhouse: model of V2 rocket, inside (left), and launch ramp for V1
“doodlebugs”. Photographs: Angela Bird

A little way past this, you will see a splendid windmill dominating the countryside. This is Watten mill, which stands alongside the ruins of an ancient abbey, overlooking the canalside village of Watten which lies at the junction of the river Aa and the Canal de la Haute-Colme.

Now you have moved from the Pas-de-Calais into the Nord département, and are rocketing through French Flanders. (To those who see the train from the ground, the sleek, white engine and carriages make an extraordinarily modern sight as they skim past fields and byways on their dedicated track.) As the train curves slightly south again, look out on the north side for the hilltop town of Cassel. It is easily recognisable, as you can make out a church and a cluster of rooftops on top of a hill known as “the Everest of Flanders” (though only 176 metres in height). It is a pity you cannot stop here, and stroll around Cassel’s cobbled square – but you can understand what a marvellous vantage-point the hill has been for military leaders - from Julius Caesar to Marshal Foch.

Cassel: Marshal Foch. Photograph: Luke Smith Cassel: rooftops. Photograph: Bonnie Robinson

Shortly after le Mont Cassel, you see another, more distant hill known as the Mont des Cats, crowned by a giant communications mast. (The Cats were an ancient tribe that once lived in the area.) Look more closely, and you will make out the pinnacles of the abbey on top of the hill where 60 Cistercian-Trappist monks lead a life of prayer and contemplation - and produce some delicious, circular cheeses. (Look out for these on the cheeseboard, if you are staying in the Lille area.)

The slender spire discernable in the distance, after the Mont des Cats, is that of Bailleul, an attractive little Flemish town known for its beer.

Bailleul. Photograph: Angela Bird

Just before you approach Lille, you slip past Armentières to the north, and the river Lys to the south – an area that saw many battles and much loss of life during World War I.

EUROSTAR: TRAVELLING SOUTH FROM LILLE

The first part of the Lille-Paris journey also crosses an area covered in the book.
Mingled with the industrial sprawl to the south of the city, are tall, conical pit-heaps – vestiges of the area’s coal-mining era. Though the mines are no longer worked, retired miners give fascinating tours of some of them. In acknowledgement of their importance to local industrial heritage, many of these remaining heaps that you will glimpse from the train are now listed monuments. In fact the whole coal basin is at present a candidate for Unesco World Heritage status.

Skimming past Arras, with never a chance to see the cobbled squares and their arcaded houses, you head south and begin to cross the battlefields of the Somme – a byword for senseless slaughter today. In fact you are running down the exact mid-line, between the front line of 1 July 1916 and that of November 1916. An extent of just 12km that killed and maimed1.2 million men of all sides.
Spare a thought, especially, as you pass:

One of five caribou memorials commemorating the terrible losses
of the Newfoundland troops in WWI. Photograph: Angela Bird

- Bullecourt – resting-place of so many Australians

- Bapaume - ………

- Guedecourt (Newfoundlanders), with one of the famous caribou sculptures similar to the one above (from nearby Beaumont-Hamel)

- Delville Wood (South Africans, Scottish and New Zealanders)

- Péronne – home to the excellent Historial de la Grande Guerre, below, which gives an overview of the Great War, its causes and its aftermath.

Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne. Photograph: Luke Smith

From here onwards, south of the river Somme, the train rushes through a sector that was in the disputed between French and German troops during World War I – and then on to Paris.

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