03 June 2019

Normandie : villages, villes, églises

I recently started thinking about Normandy again because a friend who owned a house up there passed away last week. She was 94, and the house is in the village called Carteret. I first went there in 1992, before I knew that's where her Normandy house was located. Then I spent time there with my friend CHM in 1998.

In May 2005 Walt and I drove up there and  I took this photo of the "old" abbey church in Lessay, not far south of Carteret. Built in the time of William the Conqueror, it survived the French Revolution but was blown up by German troops in 1944. It was rebuilt in the years after the war. It's said to be a faithful restoration.

Old Rouen

Then yesterday it dawned on me that June 2 was the anniversary of the day we arrived in France in 2003. We had bought our house in Saint-Aignan, but it wasn't furnished yet. We were waiting for our container to arrive from California. The first place we went on arrival was Normandy — Rouen, to be precise, in eastern Normandy — where I lived and worked in 1972-73. I still had friends there and they let us stay with them for a few days to get over jet lag before driving down to Saint-Aignan to get our household set up here.



Here are a few photos that I took on June 4, 2003, in Rouen. We had arrived to find the city in the grips of a heat wave. It was beautiful, with bright blue skies that Normandy is not really famous for. Rouen is a very old city with three grand churches in it. One of them is the cathedral that the impressionist painter Claude Monet so famously painted many times in different seasons.







Another grand church in Rouen is called Saint-Ouen. I lived a few minutes' walk from this church back in 1972-73, and I worked in a lycée (high school) just a few meters up the street from here. Funny, when I think back on that time I remember gray skies and constant rain, so it was fun to see it again when the weather was so beautiful.







One of the most famous landmarks in Rouen is this old clock called Le Gros-Horloge. A pedestrian street runs under it through an archway. The old marketplace and the cathedral are just steps away.








This photo shows it from a little farther away. I must have walked under it hundreds of times over the years, because I kept going back to Rouen regularly all through the decades after my year there in the early '70s.

3 comments:

  1. Very interesting for me, but probably not for you. The church at Lessay, even if a recreation, is almost identical to and so a prototype for the Norman church at Melbourne, Derbyshire, where I spent my youth. The Melbourne church was considerably altered in later years but that's how it must have looked when first built. Sorry, this is boring, but I could not resist the comment. Roderick

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    Replies
    1. No, not boring to me. They say the restoration at Lessay was very faithful to the original. I've never been to Derbyshire but maybe someday.

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  2. Love seeing these photos of Rouen in the sun!

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