(Image from Wikimedia Commons)
On Saturday, we drove into Bayeux, where we spent considerable time looking at the very famous Bayeux Tapestry and looking about the accompanying museum. My wife has see the Tapestry several times, but this is my first visit to Normandy. It’s a fascinating illustrated document, 230 feet long, that was possibly commissioned either by Queen Matilde (the wife of William of Conqueror) or by Bishop Odo (William’s half-brother) to tell the story of the events leading up to the pivotal Battle of Hastings in 1066. It’s a work of transparent political propaganda, but enormously informative.
Having, a few years ago, devoted a day to walking the actual site of the Battle of Hastings (which is outside Hastings, at the site of the former Battle Monastery) and another day to inspecting William’s tower at Dover (and having visited William’s Tower of London multiple times), it was fun to see things from the other end.
After the best crepes I’ve ever eaten (in a café near the Tapestry museum, atop a medieval mill), we walked over to the beautiful Cathedral of Bayeux.
Next, we did the D-Day museum in Bayeux, which is very good. Then we traveled to Juno Beach and Gold Beach, as well as to Arromanche, where Winston Churchill’s artificial harbor (jocularly known as “Port Winston”) was set up in the days following the initial Allied landings. Today, there’s a powerful 360 degree slide show of the invasion and its aftermath in a visitors center on the cliffs overlooking Arromanche.
I had a really good Norman (Camembert) hamburger in the village itself.
This is a vastly interesting place.
Posted from Carentan, Normandy, France
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