Saint-Omer: Hitler's V-2 Bunkers and the Audomarois Marshes

Required Activities

• Walk the Blockhaus d'Éperlecques through woods still cratered by the bombing, find the roof slab — 5 m thick and 37,000 tonnes, cast on the ground and jacked up so the walls could be built under it — and the plaque to René Mouchotte, the Free French fighter leader killed escorting the raid of 27 August 1943

• Ride the lift up inside the chalk at La Coupole to the galleries under the dome, stand in the unfinished hexagonal hall where the rockets were to be stood up — 41 m across and 33 m high as designed — and follow the three strands of the museum: the Occupation in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, the German missiles, and the spaceflight that came out of them

• Go out on the marsh canals in a bacôve, the flat-bottomed barge that carried cattle, vegetable crates and even the postman here until the 1970s, then walk the 5 km wheelchair-accessible path round the étangs du Romelaëre reserve at Clairmarais

• Buy from one of the forty-odd market gardeners still working the marsh professionally: summer cauliflower, grown here since about 1751, or the winter chicon the district took up around 1920, out of the fifty-odd vegetables raised on these plots

• Find morta, the half-fossilised black bog wood dug out of the peat here, which polishes up like ebony and went into panelling and furniture in the marsh houses, and if you are here on the last Sunday of July watch the Haut-Pont water procession through Saint-Omer