P and J's Excellent Adventure: And then the rain came

Thursday 13 August 2020

And then the rain came

It rained a bit during the night but had stopped by the time we got up, leaving puddles in the carpark. Our sleep had been broken by the surprising amount of road traffic coming through, so not ideal. We missed the speciality of the area: Le Vast Brioche so we'll never know what made it so good.

We headed to Barfleur which is a small port near the top-right (ie, NE) of the Cotentin peninsula. It reminded us of Devon and Cornwall. I only found one defensive position and maybe an anti-tank wall though I'm pretty sure there would have been more.

Barfleur at low tide

Aha! An emplacement! (But just the one.)

Barfleur

From there we could have followed the coast road but missed the turn-off. We had two serendipitous finds because of it though.

The first a German navigation aid site Erika 2. I'd not heard of it and it isn't on the tourist maps but it was hard to miss the huge lumps of concrete! The system worked by broadcasting on two frequencies. Equipment on a bomber could work out location to within 400m. Early GPS.

Each of these lumps had a 20m wooden tower supporting (metal) aerials. There were also two generator room bunkers and a command bunker. The latter has been done up for public viewing but there didn't seem to be anything going on when we passed by.

There wasn't much incentive to sight-see as it had bucketed down when we first arrived. We had lunch in St Pierre Eglise, though as predicted our power was very low so we only just managed to boil the kettle!

When then tootled off to our park-up in Bretteville and came across this:

A megalithic (lit: large rock) sepulchre from Neolithic age.

Bretteville has a camp (in an 18th C fort) that we were aiming for so we could charge up, but the office was shut when we arrived so we just went to a park-up on the other side of the bay. The fort, btw, had been updated over the years and of course the Germans continued that to prevent landings in the bay.