Dune(s)…

The Biville dunes, about twenty kilometres southwest of Cherbourg, are a strange landscape. As we leave the village, the road narrows. We leave the bocage area, and as we come out of the first bend, we find ourselves speechless in front of a semi-desert landscape, halfway between a Western movie set and an African savannah (without the lions and elephants… 🤓). For several kilometres, these impressive dunes, both large and small, form a kind of rampart between the ocean and its immense beach of fine sand on one side, and the Cotentin plateau on the other. Sometimes, a small pine forest has managed to establish itself in the sand and replaces the carpet of short grass that covers almost all the other dunes. Elsewhere, because we are still in Normandy (even if on the opposite coast from the landing beaches), a German tank carcass slowly rusts in the sand. Some have been repainted by local “artists”. Others still have bits of tracks on their wheels, or their cannon pointed at an invisible enemy… On the beach, a bunker or battery placed on the sand every 200m tells the story of darker days when the dunes of Biville were the scene of less artistic events… And then in the evening, the dunes of Biville are ablaze in the setting sun. The shades of yellow give way to orange colours, while beyond the dunes, just ahead in the ocean, the silhouettes of the islands of Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney emerge on the horizon. It is a very simple place, but it is a place that exudes tranquility. It is the kingdom of rabbits and hares, and also of a few deer who come to enjoy the coolness of the pine forests. In the vastness of the dunes, nothing seems able to disturb the immutable ritual of thousands of grains of sand shaping and undoing these ephemeral mountains. Normandy surprised us with the beauty of its landscapes (and the friendliness of its inhabitants), and the dunes of Biville only confirm this impression…