Normandy 2016 Day 13 - A final French brewery

Day 13 – Wednesday 8^th June

A new brewery for our final day

Following breakfast on our last full day in France, we headed off into a somewhat cloudy & misty morning. To our drive up to our final brewery in France on this trip – the Brasserie Thiriez. This is a small craft brewery located in Esquelbecq, a town in the Arrondissement of Dunkirk , in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais région of France. It is quite close to the Belgian border.

We drove up through the rolling French countryside without event. Although going past a sign, we had not seen before, indicating the Greenwich Meridian seemed to be quite odd!

We arrived at the brewery on a very warm afternoon. So being invited to have a sample of beer by Marielle, the wife of brewer Daniel (who was busy brewing), was very welcome… as was the second…

We took our bags up to our rooms ,which were spacious and comfortable. Returning to the bar to find a brewery tour about to start, which we joined. Unfortunately, our language skills weren’t up to the detail of the talk, however, having been on some of these in the UK, we picked up the basics!

And then, of course, it would have been rude not to have joined in with some further sampling of the beer! The upshot of all of this was that we then bought some to bring back to the UK with us!

Massacre at Wormhoudt

During my earlier WW2 researches and reading, I’d become aware of an incident during the British & French retreat to Dunkirk. A group of soldiers were captured, put into a barn by SS troops & then shot. There are a number of such incidents, but the one at Wormhoudt is relatively well known being the subject of a number of books. As this was not far away,and as it was still light, we decided to go & see the site.

Unfortunately, I found it very disappointing. Whilst there is a memorial & some explanatory markers around the site, it had not been looked after at all well. The central mound, atop which was a place where you could overlook the whole site, had suffered particularly badly. All in all, it was nowhere near as well looked after as other sites that we had visited. It was a poor tribute to those soldiers that had lost their lives here.