france Archives - James Clay Stuff

April 7, 2025

Dunkerque #50places2025

DFDS had emailed an offer celebrating twenty five years of their Dover Dunkerque (Dunkirk) route, you could buy a ticket for a day trip for just £25. What a bargain I thought. The last time I had been on a day trip to France was in the 1980s. Then you either caught the Sealink, the Townsend Thoresen ferry, or a hovercraft!

I arrived at Dover in plenty of time for my 0800 ferry crossing. After passport control, I drove around to the DFDS check in. The man there said would I like to catch an earlier ferry to Calais at 0740, which would arrive fifty minutes earlier into France. I didn’t hesitate, would be nice to see Calais, which I had not visited since the 1980s, through had driven through a few times since after catching a ferry or driving through the tunnel.

Having spent some time in Calais I headed up the A16 to Dunkerque.

I had visited Dunkerque last summer on my way back from a driving holiday to France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg. We stopped and stayed there the night before catching the ferry the next day back to Dover. As a result I didn’t do much exploring and didn’t even have the chance to get to the infamous beach. So I had always planned to go back. The DFDS offer gave me that opportunity.

Having arrived in Dunkerque, I drove to the beach and parked. I went to the Operation Dynamo Museum which was excellent and good value at €8.

After exploring the museum I went for a walk along the promenade. Saw the infamous dunes of Dunkerque beach from where the 1940 evacuation had taken place. I had intended to walk quite a bit of the beach, stop for some food or coffee. However, it was getting colder and then it started to rain. A lot of places were closed as well. So, I walked back to the car.

After a quick visit to a supermarket, I headed to the centre of the town to do some more exploring.

After coffee, I decided I would go up the tower in the Beffroi Saint-Éloi de Dunkerque. There was a lift to the bells, but then you had to climb a very steep, narrow, low headroom spiral staircase. The views were impressive. I had to walk down the stairs backwards, so I didn’t bang my head.

As I left the tower it was raining. Went back to the place I had coffee and had another one. This time I had a dessert as well.

I did think about what to do next, but realised I was running out of time, the weather was unpredictable. So, I headed out of Dunkerque, but stopped at the large Carrefour. Lots of lovely things in there. I got a few more things and a loaf of bread, which I was expecting to be stale the following morning.

Left the supermarket with what I thought was just about the right amount of time, but I got to the terminal with plenty of time to spare.

At times it was quite surreal, knowing that I was only in France for the day

April 3, 2025May 7, 2025

Calais #50places2025

I hadn’t planned to visit Calais, but I recently ended up there.

DFDS had emailed an offer celebrating twenty five years of their Dover Dunkerque route, you could buy a ticket for a day trip for just £25. What a bargain I thought.

As passport control is done at Dover, when I arrived in Calais, I was able to drive straight off the ferry and off to the town. Whilst I was on the ferry I had looked at parking places and had put one into Waze. Unfortunately as I drove there, following the route, one of the roads I went down was closed for roadworks. I made the detour, but got to the car park in the end.

I could see the Town Hall, which I remembered from my visits there in the 1980s. After taking a photograph or two I headed towards what I thought was the beach.

Nothing seemed very familiar, but it had been over forty years since I was last in Calais walking about. After checking a map at a shopping centre and realised I was going in the wrong direction. At the Town Hall I had turned left, when I should have turned right!

This time it started becoming more familiar. There had been some development, the Place D’Armes was very different to how I remembered it. When I went to Calais in the 1980s this was very much either a car park, or where the market was. I remember there been a fair there on one visit.

I walked to the marina and then I walked to the Phare de Calais (lighthouse) before walking back to the car and preparing to head off to my originally planned destination of Dunkerque.

I enjoyed my nostalgic visit to Calais, it was a pity the weather wasn’t better.

This year I have planned to visit fifty places.

July 30, 2024

Back to Honfleur

In July I made a trip over to France and Germany. The first stage of the trip was a sea crossing from Newhaven to Dieppe. We were staying at a campsite close to the village of Nesles-la-Vallée, however after Dieppe, we went to Fecamp and then crossed the Seine and went to Honfleur.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s we would go on family holidays to Normandy and Honfleur was one of those places that stuck in my young memory. It was so very different to the English towns I had experienced, with it’s tall buildings, narrow streets and strange shops. Back then I didn’t have a camera at first and when I eventually did get one it was a 110 film instamatic style camera. This was a terrible camera (from Boots I think it was) and the quality of the prints were awful, covered in all those stickers and usually blurred. Well you could blame the photographer.

In the late 1990s I made a weekend trip to Normandy, and I did want to visit Honfleur again. This time I took my 35mm SLR and took some photographs, which I posted to the blog back in 2015.

This time I used my iPhone 13 to take some photographs.

July 25, 2024

Nesles-la-Vallée

In July I made a trip over to France and Germany. The first stage of the trip was a sea crossing from Newhaven to Dieppe. We then stayed at a campsite close to the village of Nesles-la-Vallée.

July 22, 2024

Dieppe at Dawn

In July I made a trip over to France and Germany. The first stage of the trip was a sea crossing from Newhaven to Dieppe and we arrived in Dieppe at 5am.

The last time I had been in Dieppe was in the 1980s on a family holiday. It was surprising how little had changed. Though the railway and harbour station had disappeared.

Combined rail and ferry services ended in 1994 after Stena Line, at that time operating as Stena Sealink on the Newhaven-Dieppe and Dover-Calais crossings, had transferred to a new terminal on the other side of the harbour. These changes coincided with the opening of the Channel Tunnel and the concomitant withdrawal of all SNCF Channel boat trains. The whole station was demolished in early 1995, and virtually no physical traces now remain.

The castle was still there at the top of the cliff.

Many of the restaurants and shops I had experienced in the 1980s were no longer there, which wasn’t a surprise, but the Monoprix department store was still there.

We had intended to have breakfast in the port, stay a a few hours and potentially even have lunch. However there wasn’t anything open (we could see) so headed off to Fecamp instead.

July 17, 2024July 19, 2024

Dunkerque #366photos2024

July 12, 2024

Tour di Eiffel #366photos2024

August 14, 2020

Château de Pierrefonds

Over the last few months we thought we wouldn’t be going on holiday at all because of Covid-19 and the lockdown. We had thought about going away in the UK, we looked at York but it was proving expensive and things we wanted to do weren’t open. At the end of July we checked a few sites and found that we could book a Eurocamp holiday relatively cheaply, especially compared to the UK holidays we had been looking at. We did wonder about the impact of Covid-19, but the story in France appeared to be less risky than in the UK! So we booked the holiday and five days we were driving down to Folkestone to catch the Eurotunnel.

Whilst we were staying at the La Croix Du Vieux Pont campsite we drove over to visit Château de Pierrefonds. It was a short drive and there was a free car park close by where we parked.

The Château de Pierrefonds is a castle situated in the commune of Pierrefonds in the Oise département (Picardy) of France.

It is on the southeast edge of the Forest of Compiègne, northeast of Paris, between Villers-Cotterêts and Compiègne.

This was a fantastic looking and in some ways fantastical looking castle. We hadn’t booked in advance, so we couldn’t go into the castle, but we did walk around the castle and admired it.

Due to Covid-19 restrictions if we wanted to go in, we had to buy pre-booked timed tickets on the internet. Oh for the days when we could just walk up to a castle or an attraction and walk in.

The Château de Pierrefonds includes most of the characteristics of defensive military architecture from the Middle Ages, though it underwent a major restoration in the 19th century.

In the 12th century, a castle was built on this site. Two centuries later, in 1392, King Charles VI turned the County of Valois (of which Pierrefonds was part) into a Duchy and gave it to his brother Louis, Duke of Orléans. From 1393 to his death in 1407, the latter had the castle rebuilt by the court architect, Jean le Noir.

In March 1617, during the early troubled days of Louis XIII’s reign, the castle, then the property of François-Annibal d’Estrées, who joined the “parti des mécontents” (party of discontent) led by Henri II, Prince of Condé, was besieged and taken by troops sent by Richelieu, the secretary of state for war. Its demolition was started, but not carried through to the end because of the enormity of the task. The exterior works were razed, the roofs destroyed and holes made in the towers and curtain walls.

The castle remained a ruin for more than two centuries. Napoleon I bought it in 1810 for less than 3,000 francs. During the 19th century, with the rediscovery of the architectural heritage of the Middle Ages, it became a “romantic ruin”.

Napoleon III decided to commission architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc to rebuild it. He applied his architectural designs to create the ideal château, such as would have existed in the Middle Ages.