Flanders brick
Oct. 30th, 2008 09:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustMostly the north of France is somewhere we drive through, on the way to or from the Channel ports; unexciting agricultural landscapes dotted with little towns of red-brick terraces, war memorials and military cemetaries. I thought I knew pretty much what the area had to offer Yet here was an entry in the guide book with a name I did not recognise at all: Bergues. It sounded promising: a medieval walled town with outlying Vauban fortifications -
It was all that, and more. We parked by the canal, walked halfway round the walls, then turned into the town, towards the belfry (part of the transnational World Heritage Site, Belfries of France and Belgium) whose carillon played tunes for us as we browsed the market and then completed our circuit of the walls. At the far end of the town, all that remains of the Abbey of Saint Winoc is a pair of towers, one square and massive, the other an elegant polygon crowned with a spire.
And almost everything was built, not of stone but of brick. It took a little time to sink in, since the brick was mostly a sandy colour rather than the familiar, homely red - brick the colour of stone, and used like stone in style and function: brick churches and brick city walls, Gothic brick, Art Nouveau brick and neo-Gothic brick (the belfry, for example, was destroyed in the Second World War, and defiantly rebuilt). What with the height of the belfry, the brightness of the sky, the market stall clustered around its base, my lack of a wide-angle lens and my own limitations, I didn't manage to photograph it to my satisfaction: but I was quite pleased with this tiny corner of the nearby church.
It turns out, too, that Bergues has recently become quite famous, in its way, as the setting of the hugely successful film Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis.
It was all that, and more. We parked by the canal, walked halfway round the walls, then turned into the town, towards the belfry (part of the transnational World Heritage Site, Belfries of France and Belgium) whose carillon played tunes for us as we browsed the market and then completed our circuit of the walls. At the far end of the town, all that remains of the Abbey of Saint Winoc is a pair of towers, one square and massive, the other an elegant polygon crowned with a spire.
And almost everything was built, not of stone but of brick. It took a little time to sink in, since the brick was mostly a sandy colour rather than the familiar, homely red - brick the colour of stone, and used like stone in style and function: brick churches and brick city walls, Gothic brick, Art Nouveau brick and neo-Gothic brick (the belfry, for example, was destroyed in the Second World War, and defiantly rebuilt). What with the height of the belfry, the brightness of the sky, the market stall clustered around its base, my lack of a wide-angle lens and my own limitations, I didn't manage to photograph it to my satisfaction: but I was quite pleased with this tiny corner of the nearby church.It turns out, too, that Bergues has recently become quite famous, in its way, as the setting of the hugely successful film Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis.
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Date: 2008-10-30 11:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-31 10:15 am (UTC)Will redo the trip with more time, sometime for sure. This post of yours is most inspiring and I knew nothing of the film, either!
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Date: 2008-10-31 01:45 pm (UTC)