Framedlight

On the Monday morning we left Paris early (6.00am) so as to be away before the commuter rush started on the Peripherique. We were not catching a ferry till 8.00pm but wanted to have a leisurely drive back through northern France, stopping when it took our fancy and avoiding the autoroute. The road passed through avenues of poplars and flowering trees, over the vasty fields of France, and we eventually stopped in a village where we found an abandoned factory.This was the Sucrerie de Franciere, where presumably sugar beet would have been processed. I have added texture to the pictures of this building as befits it. Lunchtime saw us by the shores of the Somme where Alan saw an otter and I took some 'arty' photographs. Finally Alan saw a swallow - our first of the year and it is his picture.

Travelling further south from Calais we spent a night at Le Crotoy on the Somme estuary. Here there is a vast expanse of sand as the Somme makes its way into the sea. This part of the coast was loved by the impressionists and it does have an almost pearlescent light. We made  brief visit to Crecy where a watchtower has been built looking over the battlefield. In Noyelles-sur-Mer we stumbled upon a Chinese cemetery. Around 140,000 Chinese were employed on the Western Front in the first world war, not in active service but as labourers. They would work for very little money and were seen as 'coolies'. After the war most of the Chinese, identified only by a number, were sent home to China. Around 6,000 went to Paris to form the nucleus of the Chinese community there. Around 2,000 died during or just after the war. Noyelles-sur-Mer was their largest camp in this part of France and most of the 841 buried in the cemetery here died from Spanish flu in the camp h...