If I rember correctly, by about 1600CE around 40% of the total area of the Netherlands consisted of land ‘reclaimed’ from the sea and, apart from its coastal sand dunes, the entire country had already become farmland. One of the origins of the english word landscape is landskip, a small C16th Dutch painting of farmland.
The other root which links landscape with terroir and heritage (rather than merely the visual) was a mediaeval Danish parliament made up of freemen who owned land.
Incidentally our house is just a few metres from the waters of the Lot, but it was built on a hard schist outcrop that will probably last a few more millennia
Secrecy I suppose. It’s still a pretty bleak area. This was the development site. The launch sites were on the west coast. There’s a very big one on the French coast that’s worth a visit.
Thanks John. That’s what I’d presumed, hence the question.
Most of my knowledge of WWII was gleaned from rereading my stepfather’s books. He’d always downplayed ‘his war’, joking that he was ‘up to his neck in muck and bullets’ while playing cards in Cairo most of the time. However, we found out just before he died that he’d actually been trapped on Malta for several months during its bombardment and when he was evacuated, his ship was sunk several hundred metres offshore and he’d had to swim back in order to experience several more months of the same.
One certainly can understand why Americans call them ‘the great generation’. Meanwhile my mother was going out dancing in Manchester during the Blitz and walking home past burning buildings. She told me about walking through Manchester’s (old) Piccadilly when most of the warehouses were on fire, but her high heels hurt so much she decided to walk barefoot despite the hot cinders on the pavement. A bit different to walking back to Whalley Range from Madchester’s Hacienda.
I wonder if in decades to come Ukrainians will look back with pride on their ‘great generation’.
They’re quite well protected and not as low as you might think. I was staying at my brothers in West Sussex over the new year. My satnav said the elevation at his house was -8 metres! It is low and was very wet but think the MSL must be a lot lower than the ellipsoid
It’s front-page today… and I’m wading through all the articles
not only to work on my French, but we’ll be staying in the town later this year and it will be good to be able to discuss with Soulac Residents and show we have a smidgen of knowledge…
I think part of the trouble in Soulac is that it covers such a vast area. Le Signal is just one part, but there are also huge problems with erosion at Amelie Plage just ever-so-slightly further along the coast.
Interestingly enough, work was done in Soulac further up the coast towards Le Verdon between the late-1830s and mid-1870s, at an eye-watering cost of approx 10 billion francs!
It happens in France as well. Tempete Xynthia caused many deaths in southern Vendee in 2010. I had an MS not far east of there at the time. In La Faute-sur-Mer alone 29 people died, trapped in their flooding houses. I think the Maire and some of his deputies were prosecuted and found guilty of manslaughter because they had illegally approved buildings in areas prone to flooding. There was I seem to remember rumour of a relative of one of the accused having built many of rhe houses.
