NORMANDY SPIRIT

Last weekend I went to Normandy, again. I say again for I have been there before to stay with old friends who live just outside Le Havre and blogged about it in this space, as they say in the newspapers. Just a quick visit, there and back, but a welcome breath of fresh air and a chance to see new sights.

Normandy is often held to be a poor relation to French provinces further to the south or west. It is the place that one hurries through after disembarking from a rough Channel crossing and hurrying towards Paris or Nantes. Perhaps it is slightly more romantic than Picardy through which one hurries even faster unless one is homesick for grey skies and stops to look in at Amiens or Arras.

Indeed, from a tourist perspective, one could imagine Normandy as a kind of Middle Class province, looking down on Picardy to the north, but looking up to Brittany to its west, though perhaps the Bretons themselves would never understand the allusion as they labour firmly under the belief that they are looked down upon by the rest of France to whom they feel themselves attached only in the most fragile manner.

Normandy of course is a province of two halves - lower and upper divided by the Seine. My friend, Chantal, who so kindly put me up this weekend and who has lived in Normandy all her life, hisses that upper Normandy is not really Normandy at all despite boasting the birthplace of William the Conqueror and the town with the shortest name in France - Eu.

Only when you cross the Seine are you in what she would regard as Normandy proper - the Normandy of the picture postcard, all dappled cows and orchards full of apple laden trees at this time of year. Thatched farmhouses, abound - all pleasingly shaped to delight the eye and almost like the orchards themselves with their vertical timber framing springing at angles from the ground to bury itself under the thatch.

Their visual beauty lifts the spirit, particularly when the houses are covered in flowers as so many of them are and when there are no ugly visual intrusions - modern concrete structures, or garish advertising - that it seems we in Britain have no control over and which most people do not even seem to notice.

We stopped in Gatteville (Eure) - there is more than one - to look at the small remains of an eleventh century castle, built by one of the Normans who crossed the Channel with William but didn’t immediately take to the grey weather of Sussex. After doing his bit at Hastings, William sent him (I’m afraid I have forgotten his name) home with a grant of land on which to build a castle and here was its remains.

I would have taken its photograph had I remembered my camera, which sadly I didn’t, and I would have photographed, too the beautiful farmhouse that sat next to it, long and low with a great overhanging roof at one end that sheltered an overhanging staircase. I am told this is known as a ‘Jay’s Bottom’ - but why is another matter.

When I did recover my camera, it was only to show that the weather was no better there than here, as you can see from the ship.