Not terribly many kilometres from the beach at Dunkirk at the end of an ancient canal, we found the ancient fortified township of Bergues, exactly where it was supposed to be.
Perhaps we could be forgiven for presuming that this would be a town with a lot of stories to tell, but not much in the way of structure that’s been around long enough to tell them. As it turns out, since eighty percent of the town was flattened in the second World War, and rebuilding after the First hadn’t actually been finished when that happened, we were pretty much on point. To the untrained eye it’s a bit difficult to discern which bits of it are old and which bits are Disneyland, but the neat little tour map did a great job of filling in the patches, as we followed its trail through the town.
The destruction of Winroc Abbey, or what’s left of it took place a little earlier though. Having survived being “burned in 1083 and 1123, in 1566 the beggars ransacked it”, it was the angry mob during the Revolution which finally did for it. This turned out to be a bit of a mistake though, as the Abbey and the imaginatively named “Pointed Tower” served as navigation markers to allow vessels to stay in the correct channel through the marshlands from Dunkirk, so presumably the revolutionaries went hungry for a time until they could rebuild the important bits. They’ve been rebuilt a few times since too thankfully, or we might never have found the place.
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