* Mulberries
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Situated on the Orne and the local canal, the Blainville factory is on the site of what used to be the Caen shipyards, shut down in 1953. It is only a few miles from the coast of Normandy and our hosts arranged for us to visit Arromanches—one of the D-day beaches.
To our complete surprise, Arromanches has not reverted to a sleepy little French watering place, but is quite unavoidably full of reminders of those Normandy landings—because 25 years of Channel weather have not succeeded in breaking up the Mulberry harbour designed to last only a few months. The great concrete caissons are a bit battered, and some are out of line, but they still ring the little bay and dominate almost every view.
And there is a really splendid D-day museum on the sea-front, complete with a "diorama" which re-enacts the progress of events on June 6 1944. And even for we two out-of-season visitors they played the En glish version of the recorded commentary.
This is all rather far removed from road transport, though if I wanted to salve my conscience 1 could remark that there were plenty of trucks in the complex and accurate models of D-day equipment in the museum. But for a variety of reasons the whole visit was unusually memorable.