One of the things we were excited for in Europe was scouting. We had been involved with a great troop in California and wanted to continue scouting in Rome. We found a small and enthusiastic troop but the past two years activities have been limited by travel and gathering restrictions. Summer camp in Switzerland looks like it will happen after two years of cancelations and the big council camporee in Normandy was finally given the go ahead. After so many missed opportunities I wanted to go mostly because we finally could. The timing wasn't great. My Girl had to miss school and My Boy wasn't able to attend because it was the same weekend as his theater performances at school. I was able to see the play on Tuesday and My Girl's school choir performance on Wednesday before leaving Thursday morning for the camporee. It was more of a jamboree, where troops gather together, but there weren't the camporee games and competitions between troops and patrols. We were the only two from Rome to attend, but we joined in with the scouts from Naples for some meals and part of the activities and had a good time. It also gave us the flexibility to see and do what we were most interested in.
View of Port in Bessin from our hotel parking lot
With so many of the council families overseas as part of the US military, the focus was on the WWII D-day beaches and historic sites. We visited Gold beach and the village of Arromanches. This is where British forces landed on D-day. Americans are probably more familiar with Omaha beach nearby. It was a cold, rainy, very windy day so we didn't spend much time on the beach.
There was a small museum that told the story of that particular location where I learned about the temporary port built by the British on the beach. A port was needed to land men and supplies, but capturing one of the heavily defended ports would have been difficult. So the British designed and build a port in sections that were floated across the channel and assembled at the beach at Arromanches. Pieces are still there and on display nearby. The museum showed a British newsreel from the time that told the story. The music is a little incongruous, so happy and upbeat, so stiff-upper-lip. A similar port was in the process of being built on Omaha beach, but it was destroyed by a summer storm and surviving pieces were scavenged for repairs on the Gold beach port.
British newsreel shown at the Arromanches museum.
Thankfully, the next day was sunny and warmer. It was the morning of the big campfire program on Omaha beach. They scheduled it for the morning because of the tides. We walked down Vierville draw where the fighting had been terrible. The German pillbox was still in place.
Vierville draw overlooking Omaha beach
The next WWII site we saw was Pointe du Hoc. This site is overseen by the American Battle Monuments Commission, in charge of memorials, monuments, and military cemeteries around the world. The visitor's center is pretty spare, but it does include a short film of veterans telling their memories of the battle. It is difficult to image scaling a 100 foot cliff with 155 mm enemy guns on top.
ABMC film - Point du Hoc
You can walk out onto the point and see the cliffs the Rangers had to scale, the remnants of the German fortifications, and the craters from the artillery bombardment.
Sunday morning was the memorial service at the American cemetery. It is always sobering to visit the war memorial cemeteries. So many died so very young.
Normandy is so much more than D-day and we wanted to see more of what the area had to offer. There is a rich Medieval and ancient history. The city of Bayeux is the home of the famous Bayeux tapestry, a 225 foot long work of embroidery, not a tapestry, commemorating the battle of Hastings, where William the Bastard from Normandy became William the Conqueror of England. The work was done sometime after the battle in 1066 and before the first written record of it in 1476. Not very specific. The museum has done a great job making it accessible to the average person with audio guides that tell the story as you walk along. High resolution images are available through the museum site. As we waited in the ticket line for the school group ahead of us we watched clips where scenes from the tapestry had been animated. I found something similar online. It was all much more interesting than I had anticipated.
Bayeux has three main museums, one for the tapestry, one for the battle of Normandy, and one they call the MAHB for local art and history. It was my favorite stop of the whole trip. The museum is housed in a former episcopal palace next to the cathedral that has been expanded and redone to fit the collections. Exhibits included items from pre-history to modern times. There were prehistoric bits of iron and pottery, Roman mile markers and frescoes from a Gallo-Roman home, early and late medieval stone carvings and paintings and so much more.
Roman mile marker showing the distance from Bayeux to Rome
Our favorite part of the museum was the lace exhibit. Bayeux was famous throughout Europe for its hand made bobbin lace during the 17th-19th centuries. By 1830 there were 15,000 lace makers in the area. The industry flourished until lace making machines crushed the hand-made industry. There were three main types of lace. Chantilly lace was made from black silk. Lace from unbleached silk was called "blonde". Bayeux lace was white, but not quite as fine, and was made from bleached cotton or linen. The lace was made into trims and edgings for the rich, or for the very wealthy entire garments such as skirts or shawls. The work was incredibly detailed and could be done by women in an era where employment options for women were very limited. There are still people who make bobbin lace today as a hobby or as a hand made art form. You can find videos of them working online.
Lace making patterns
Lace making bobbins
A close second favorite in the museum was the porcelain exhibit. Porcelain was also an important industry in Bayeux through the 19th century until the factory closed in 1951. The exhibit included examples of beautifully and delicately hand painted tea sets and table ware. I liked the cornflower decorations. Street signs and building numbers were also popular products. My favorite pieces were the labware they made for chemists. I found it elegantly simple with lovely proportions. Each piece was marked with a delicate BX for Bayeux. I wish I could buy it today for my home. You can find porcelain labware from other makers since chem labs still use these sorts of things all the time, but it isn't the same.
Source: Mapping Gothic
(Amazing site by Columbia University. Lots of info and photos including VR tours.)I didn't really investigate where to go and what to see we just sort of went. I had heard of the cathedral at Chartres from my class. It is one that seems to make it into the textbooks so I thought it would be worth a visit. It was of course beautiful, but felt smaller than I had expected for some reason, even though it was still quite large. My points of reference were the cathedral in Cologne and Notre Dame in Paris, some of the largest Gothic churches built later.
Chartres Cathedral with its mismatched front towers
A series of cathedrals has stood on this site. The earliest was first mentioned in 743 AD. Wars and fires destroyed the earlier versions. The church we now see was started in 1024, completed, the repaired and rebuilt after a fire in 1194. The church as it now stands was dedicated in 1260.
The stained glass was impressive. The stone between the panes of the round rose windows on the west face is quite substantial compared to the delicate laciness of later rose windows, including the later windows in other parts of the church. The front face is in the early Gothic and Romanesque styles and is heavier and more substantial than later work. After a fire destroyed much of the church, the main body was rebuilt in a High Gothic style that is more intricate and delicate.
Recently there has been a controversial cleaning project to remove centuries of soot and grime from the interior stone. It takes the old stones back to nearly white. You definitely get much more of the light, bright, airy feeling the Gothic architects were trying to achieve, but I miss the patina that comes with age and use.
Chartres cathedral partially cleaned
The inside walls of the ambulatory
Bayeux Cathedral
We visited during the late afternoon and really got to see the stained glass doing its job to fill the church with light and color. The windows themselves are quite impressive, but I really enjoyed the colored light on the walls and floor.
Bayeux cathedral crypt
Norman Romanesque crypt, Bayeux cathedral
Exterior Bayeux cathedral
I really liked Bayeux. It would be a good base camp for a longer Normandy stay. There is a lot to see in the area. It's just big enough to be interesting without being a major city. I didn't see it in the height of tourist season so perhaps it gets overrun during the summer, but it's great for a rainy spring weekend.
Every time I mention a place to John he knows the area from WWI or WWII battles. On our way back we stopped in Falaise to see the castle of William the Conqueror. In addition to its rich Medieval history it was the site of the decisive battle for Normandy during WWII. During this modern battle much of the town was destroyed. In the rebuilt church there are photos and a model showing the destruction of the city in the aftermath of the battle. It was all very quiet on the Sunday afternoon we visited.
William was born here in 1027 in the first stone castle on the site of the current Falaise castle which was built by William's grandfather or great-grandfather. The castle was destroyed, ruined, and rebuilt several times. It mostly survived the battles of WWII with the main damage to the exterior walls. The castle today is missing all of its artifacts and furnishings, but they have done a great job with the animations projected on the walls telling the history of the Dukes of Normandy and their wives who lived here. You can see how the rooms might have looked thanks to AR tablets. It's pretty cool. You can see what it might have looked like and get more information on the bits that interest you. I think they did a great job of explaining the history and making it interesting for those who don't know a lot about the people involved. We've really enjoyed learning about a period of history I knew little about before.
Falaise castle
On a picturesque pedestrian street running between the cathedral and the city square where Joan of Arc died is the famous city clock, le Gros Horlage. This mechanism for this astronomical clock was made in 1389 and is one of the oldest in France. The clock was originally housed in the clock tower but was then moved in1529 to the arch where it is today. There is a single hand that moves around the dial with a sheep pointing the hour. Wool and textiles were important sources of wealth in Medieval and Renaissance Rouen. Sheep doubled as religious symbols and symbols of the wealthy local textile guilds.
Le Gros Horlage at dusk
Rouen cathedral is famous today, in part, because of the series of paintings by Claude Monet. It's a massive late Gothic building with a central spire. The Medieval spire burned after being struck by lightning in the 19th century. It was then replaced by a taller spire made of cast iron, becoming the highest in Europe and the tallest building in the world for a couple of years. The iron spire is undergoing renovation since the cast iron proved to be too brittle to last. As a result, the base of the spire is covered and the center of the cathedral is full of scaffolding. There is a constant push and pull to keep these old buildings standing. You can see evidence of it in visible cracks between the bricks in the ceiling as if something were pulling the walls apart. Nets are strung across the nave in case something falls. A PBS show on the great cathedrals explains it well.
We only had a few minutes to explore the inside since the church opened at 2 pm and we had a flight out of Paris that evening. It was OK. I was reaching my weekend quota for Gothic churches. We rushed back to the airport for our flight home and just made it to the gate. We were the last ones on the plane, but we made it. I hate cutting it that close.
We had a great few days. I'm so glad we made the effort to go.
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