St. Saëns: French Impressions.

St. Saëns: French Impressions I
5 - 6 May 2001

Location	St. Saëns, Normandy, France On a whim I decided to go to France. This page is about the first bit of the journey, from Dover to St. Saëns. Included is also a walk in the forest of Eawy. The next page is about my visit to Dieppe and the way back towards London.

Weather	Sunny on the 5th but mainly cloudy on the 6th.

Bibliography	Hachette Vacances Normandy

Click on the images to see larger versions.

	Dover castle perches high on a cliff above the town itself. I didn't go there but I did go to the Painted Villa, the remains of a Roman house. It is definitely the best Roman museum I've been to so far. The house was preserved in Roman times already when a new town wall was built and parts of the house were simply filled in to act as support for the wall. It's kind of shabby but the contents are much more interesting than the posher museums in St. Albans and Colchester.

On the ferry's sun deck I took this picture down towards the car deck. The white thing at the bottom of the picture is the roof of a bus.

	Surely one of the most photographed places in southern England - the white cliffs of Dover. They will forever remind me of a very bad Swedish song called "Mellan Dover och Calais".

I took the road from Calais south towards Rouen and ended up in St. Saëns, a small provincial town. My goal was to stop when I felt it was time to look for a hotel. St. Saëns proved to be a very cute village with a river running through it.

	A closer look at the bridge.

On the other side of the bridge a path leads down to the water.

	In front of the church I found this monument. I don't remember what it was supposed to remind us of but I like the way the evening light plays on it.

The morning light falls on a street lamp. With the wooden shutters this is a very French house.

	Another picture of the light.

The forest of Eawy was just a few kilometres north of St. Saëns. I bought some Neufchatel cheese, bread and local sausage and set off in the morning. It is very obviously a planted forest or it wouldn't be this airy.

	The path is straight like an American motorway but the sunny woods still managed to capture my imagination.

Here is a better look at the newly leafed beech trees.

	The wildlife was perhaps not very impressive.

Although the colour of this slug makes it look really toxic.

	But the main attraction were the bluebells. They were everywhere.

A closer look at one clump reveals the bell-shaped individual flowers, several to a stem. I sat near these eating Neufchatel cheese on the bread from the bakery in St. Saëns, feeling very French. Although I didn't see any other picnickers besides me. Maybe the habit died out with the Impressionists.

	I didn't actually think I could get tired of beech woods with bluebells but after a couple of hours I had had my fill.

Normandy is famous for its cider and calvados, both made of local apples. This means that there are many orchards and they were all in full bloom at this time.

	A closer look at the flowers.