Manoir de La Saucerie.

This is a strange, eerie place. Manoir de la Saucerie (Commune de la Haute Chapelle) near Domfront in the Orne. It a castle gatehouse without the castle. There is even a part-moat — a pond and a bridge over it that may have once been a drawbridge. There are slits for the chains.

It stands in a corner of a flat marshy plain. There are a few houses nearby and cows graze in the fields but otherwise the place looks as though it's deserted.

The manor dates from the late 12th century when there was a trend for knights to move out of the small houses they had previously occupied within the bailey to live in fortified houses in the countryside. Aliénor (Eleanor) of Aquitaine, queen of both England and France, gave the land to one of her knights, Robert Le Saucier. Why he left us only this beautiful (recently restored) gatehouse, I don't know. Perhaps there was a palisade. There was also a manor house nearby, it burned down in 19th Century.

Twelfth Night.

Twelfth night, the tree goes out with a bucketful of needles, and Lenin is back in the window.

Frosty Morning.

Frosty Morning (-1ºC) on New Year's Eve.

Les vaches de Normandie — Norman cows.

Yesterday on a country road. Cows marching for the morning milking session, around 10 o'clock. The farmer's wife is at the back, urging the cows on. He is somewhere at the head of the procession. 

Note the huge udder in th first photo. Stone crosses with crucifixes are at every crossroad in our parts.

Remembrance Sunday Poppies

Someone asked me the other day if poppies do really grow in Flanders fields.

They do, and in Normandy too. Here is a photo of red poppies in a field of wheat near the town of Falaise, where the battle for Normandy finished 70 years ago in 1944.

Homage to Ukraine.

Blue sky and flaming yellow blossom of a rape seed field. The colours of Spring in Normandy.

Blue and yellow are also the colours of Ukrainian national flag. I took this photo near the village of St Cristophe de Chaulieu in South Manche.

First frost in Normandy.

It's +2ºC in Moscow, -1ºC in the Bocage Normand.