France 2010, Hardelot Plage (again) and Etaples

The cottage was just a few kilometres from the holiday resort town of Le Touquet Paris Plage but we hadn’t visited yet so we agreed that as this was our last day that we really ought to go and see the place and after breakfast we loaded the cars and set off.

We made good progress at first but as we got closer to the coast the roads began to get busy, progress slowed down and then eventually ground to a complete halt. I calculated that we were still about six kilometres from the town and the coast and the traffic was at an almost complete standstill. It seemed that everyone else in Northern France had also decided to visit Le Touquet today.

I have visited Le Touquet a couple of times and stayed there while on golfing holidays and I think it is a very nice place but not so special that I would want to queue for an hour or so to get in and then struggle to find a parking space if I ever made it. Not sure because unlike the surrounding towns of Nord Pas de Calais, the words ‘quaint’ and ‘medieval’ have no place there. The resort is too young for cobbles and ramparts and the same goes for museums and Cathedrals. I also seem to remember a lot of dog shit! The main event is Le Touquet itself, a case of leisure over culture and I was certain that we could all live with the disappointment of not actually going there so at a convenient junction we left the line of crawling traffic and decided instead to revisit Hardelot because we were certain that there were some parts of the town that we had missed earlier in the week.

The locals call Hardelot ‘little Le Touquet’ but there were no such traffic problems getting in and we drove effortlessly to the centre and parked in a car park where we were the only two cars. The sun was shining but it was a bit too breezy for the beach so we headed instead for the tiny town centre and its couple of streets of shops and restaurants. Actually there wasn’t a great deal to see and this didn’t take very long and very soon afterwards we were on the promenade and enjoying the bracing sea air.

Hardelot is a well-to-do sort of town and many Parisians own property here and use it for summer and weekend breaks. Apart from the grand villas however I personally don’t find the place that attractive and behind the sea front is a ribbon of featureless high rise flats most of them with their shutters firmly closed for most of the year. Like Le Touquet, Hardelot was occupied by the Nazis in the Second-World-War and they did huge amounts of damage before retreating ahead of the Allied invasion forces. Much of it had to be rebuilt and this explains the prominence of these rather unattractive buildings.

We walked back through the town and found a sunny spot to stop for a refreshment break and ordered some beer and sipped it slowly on account of the prices and then speculating that the roads might be less busy now we decided to have a second attempt at getting into Le Touquet.

The route to Le Touquet took us towards the old fishing town of Étaples on the river Canche and just outside the town we stopped to visit the largest Commonwealth War Graves site in France where nearly twelve thousand soldiers are buried.

Because of its strategic position Étaples was the scene of much Allied activity during World War One due to its safety from attack by enemy land forces and the existence of railway connections with both the northern and southern battlefields. The town was home to sixteen hospitals and a convalescent depot, in addition to a number of reinforcement camps for Commonwealth soldiers and general barracks for the French Army. By all accounts this was a truly dreadful place and most soldiers buried in the cemetery died after treatment in the hospitals. It is said that after two weeks, many of the wounded would rather return to the front with unhealed wounds rather than remain at Étaples.



It was also a particularly notorious base camp for those on their way to the front. Under atrocious conditions, both raw recruits and battle-weary veterans were subjected to intensive training in gas warfare, bayonet drill, and long sessions of marching at the double across the dunes. There was resentment against the officers who enjoyed the better conditions of Le Touquet and from which the men were forbidden to visit and this led to a famous mutiny in September 1917 which was brutally repressed.

Apart from the solemn rows of white headstones there was no reminder of this unpleasantness today as we entered the cemetery through the impressive memorial designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and walked through the carefully tended graves. I had never visited a war graves site before and it was poignant to read the inscriptions on the graves and sad to see how young so many of them were who never returned to England. Molly ran and skipped through the rows of graves and I was struck by the fact that she could only do this because of the ultimate sacrifices made by all these men.

After the visit to the cemetery we continued on our journey towards Le Touquet but at Étaples the traffic ground to a halt again and not wishing to spend our last afternoon in a traffic jam we resigned ourselves to not seeing Le Touquet this year and turned the cars around and returned to the cottage at Longvilliers.

It was lovely sitting in the garden in the late afternoon, the sun was shining and there was no wind, Molly played in her pool, the wasps kept falling in the improved trap, we drank some beer and wine and Richard prepared for what he promised would be the best log fire of the week. Later, when it had cooled down, Molly and I went for a walk into the village and had a last look at the livestock in Camille’s garden and I knew she understood that this would be the last time because we were going home tomorrow.

Molly went to sleep earlier than usual and Richard didn’t let us down with the fire. He supervised a final excellent barbeque meal where we used up all of the remaining food including the last of the pasta dishes that Rachel and Sally had prepared four nights ago! After the food Richard placed his specially selected log on the fire and it entertained us for a couple of hours or so as it burnt away in the brick barbeque and slowly turned to embers and ash. We had enjoyed our barbeque meals but they were all over now and we left the garden and went to bed knowing that the first job in the morning was to pack.

The next day the weather was miserable again so with no reason to hang around we finished our packing, tidied the cottage and after the return of the deposit we set off for Calais with plenty of time allowed for a second visit to Carrefour at the Cité de Europe to stock up on cheap beer and wine.

We left France in a rain storm and arrived backing England to be greeted by another one and on account of the bad weather we felt sorry for all the people queuing to take our place on the ferry for the return crossing.

We had had another good week in France and we all look forward to returning again perhaps next year.

France 2010, Hardelot Plage

There was much better weather the next morning so after breakfast we were in no particular rush to leave the cottage and stayed around the garden and entertained Molly before taking a slow walk along the village lanes to see the farm animals. Camille spotted us and came outside to say bonjour and then insisted on a guided tour of his garden with its immaculate vegetable plot overflowing with plump ripe produce. He couldn’t speak a word of English but he explained in great detail what everything was and how best to prepare, cook and eat it. I could follow some of this by picking out the odd familiar schoolboy French word but to be honest most of it was just a rapid Gallic blur.

Molly had no interest in the vegetables but she liked it when he took us into an outhouse to introduce us to his pet rabbit (I like to think it was a pet and not just being fattened for the pot) and a scruffy white dove in a tiny cage and she was very reluctant to leave. I had to bribe her out with a walk around the poultry pens and a quick lesson in bird identification. I knew that having seen it she wasn’t going to forget that rabbit and sure enough we had to visit the thing every day after this until the end of the holiday.

Mid morning and Richard and I went to the nearest supermarket about fifteen kilometres away and took Molly so that the girls could get ready for a trip to the sea and with the sun shining we planned to return to the beach but this time to visit the nearby resort of Hardelot in between Le Touquet and Boulogne. Richard and I had played golf there a couple of years ago but we had never visited the beach before.

To get there required a cross country journey through a succession of small towns and villages along narrow roads meandering through undulating countryside with golden fields of freshly cut hay contrasting with and harmonising perfectly against the rich green meadows with their herds of lazy grazing cattle. We reached the larger town of Dannes next to a series of ugly clay quarries carved thoughtlessly out of the countryside and then picked up the approach road to Hardelot and the beach.

Like most of this coastline Hardelot is lined with a ribbon of attractive white sand dunes decorated with wispy tufts of grass and facing out to the sea but what makes this place especially attractive is a six hundred acre forest immediately behind the coast line. In 1905, an Englishman, Sir John Whitley, who had already developed the resort of Le Touquet, bought huge amounts of this land and immediately set about developing Hardelot as a new and fashionable resort with an aspiration to create a world centre of excellence for sports. A number of new villas were built on the seafront and in the pine forests by the famous architect Louis-Marie Cordonnier, a friend of John Whitley, who designed these vast and unique villas that today characterize the small town.

We parked the car in a side street next to the tall villas with their wooden verandas and brightly painted woodwork and walked to the beach through immaculate open spaces and well maintained streets and I was struck with something that makes Hardelot stand out from other places in France and that was the total absence of dog shit and for once we didn’t need to be careful where we walked. Mostly in France they don’t mind offensive canine poops spread all over the pavements for people to step in and slip on but here they keep this place really clean and I was pleased to see signs on the promenade that made it clear that dogs were definitely not welcome in Hardelot.

Before going to the beach we found a restaurant with pavement tables on the edge of the promenade and as Molly was fast asleep we decided not to disturb her and stop and have a drink. Only one drink mind you because one thing that never ceases to amaze me is the bar and restaurant prices in France. There seems no real logic to it – Richard and I had a 30cl bottle of beer and each one cost €3.5 but I can buy six bottles of the same beer in Carrefour for just a few cents more and these excessive charges must result in hundreds of lost customers. I certainly won’t use the bars in France as much as I would, say, in Spain or Greece.

After Molly woke we spent an hour or so on the immaculately clean beach (surprisingly not Blue Flag) and Molly built some more sand castles and decorated them with shells in between paddling in the unexpectedly warm sea and running about on the firm hard sand. But the weather began to change as clouds swooped in from the west and took the sun away and with a stiff breeze blowing it was turning chilly so we decided to call it a day and return inland where the sun was still shining.

Getting out of Hardelot proved a lot more difficult than getting in and two or three wrong turns meant that we ended up in an unfamiliar location and we had to fumble our way along the narrow lanes trying to find our way back to Longvilliers. It wasn’t that bad of course and we did get to enjoy some more views of the countryside on the way.

Back in the cottage garden where we were sheltered from the wind and the sun was still shining we drank beer and wine and ate afternoon snacks, Sally crafted a wasp trap to distract and catch the little critters that were bothering us, Richard selected logs for this evening’s barbeque and Molly played in her pool and kept us entertained with her antics. It was a lovely garden overlooking Camille’s well stocked vegetable plot and with plenty of space to run about and play in. We were beginning to like this place more and more.

In the evening we did almost the same as the previous night with another fine meal outside under the stars, played some card games and the chit-chatted our way through a few bottles of strong lager and proceeded to the gin and tonic. Sometime just before midnight the alcohol took control and losing the power of coherent speech and the loss of essential muscle control which nearly led to a nasty accident while poking the logs on the fire I decided that enough was enough and retired to bed leaving Richard to straighten up the garden behind me.