Crécy and Saint-Riquier: The Battlefield of 1346, the Blind King and the Flamboyant Abbey

Required Activities

• Drive out of Crécy on the Dompierre-sur-Authie road to the Moulin d'Édouard III and climb the two-storey wooden tower put up there in 1984: from the top, work out the ground between you and Estrées, and whether a king standing in a mill on this rise could really have seen the whole of his army's day

• On the Grand-Place, read the inscription on the pedestal of Emmanuel Fontaine's monument of 1905 — paid for by subscription in France, Bohemia and Luxembourg for a blind king who fought for someone else's country — then drive out to Estrées-lès-Crécy on the Fontaine-sur-Maye road and find the Croix de Bohême standing alone in the fields where he is thought to have fallen: 14th-century, worn almost smooth, and the oldest memorial of the battle there is

• Walk into the forest of Crécy from the RD 105 and make for a named place in it — la Hutte des Grands Hêtres, les Grands Hêtres or the Poteau de Nouvion — where the circles, enclosures and burial mounds of the late Bronze Age still show under the beeches, or to the standing stone at la Longue Borne

• At Saint-Riquier, stand back from the 15th-century flamboyant west front of a church 96 m long and 50 m high, then go inside for the opposite of it — 17th-century woodwork, marble and grilles, paintings by Jouvenet and Bon Boullongne, a Christ by Girardon — and ask in the treasury room for the Dit des trois morts et des trois vifs, the tale of three living men who meet three corpses on the road

• Start or finish at the Centre Historique Crécy la bataille, the interpretation centre opened in 2021 in place of the old museum, and come out of it able to say one thing you did not know: how an outnumbered army on a slope beat the heavy cavalry of France