Qualla: Boulonnais

Boulonnais: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit grassrootsgroundswell, CC BY 2.0. Almost every coastline in France faces south or east. Boulonnais does not. Drive north from Le Touquet and the land tilts slowly upward, the fields giving way to wooded ridges, and somewhere west of Boulogne the coast performs a small geographic act of defiance: it turns to face the open Atlantic. From here to Cap Gris-Nez, the cliffs and beaches look due west into the English Channel, the only stretch of mainland France that does this north of the Loire estuary. The chalk under your feet is the same chalk that resurfaces, twenty-six miles across the water, as the white cliffs of Dover. The two coasts were once joined. The Strait of Dover is the place where the joining failed.

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Image: grassrootsgroundswell | CC BY 2.0

Boulonnais: The End of a Wave

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bodoklecksel, CC BY-SA 3.0. Geologically, the Boulonnais is the eastern end of the Weald-Artois Anticline - a great upward arch of chalk that runs from southern England under the Channel and reappears here as a curved belt of downs. The high ground meets the sea twice, at Cap Gris-Nez in the north and at th...

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Image: Bodoklecksel | CC BY-SA 3.0

Boulonnais: The White Draft

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ottaviani Serge, Public domain. If the Boulonnais is famous for one thing beyond its geography, it is for its horses. The Boulonnais breed is a heavy draft horse with a coat that is most commonly an almost luminous grey-white, a small fine-boned head out of all proportion to its enormous muscular body, and a te...

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Image: Ottaviani Serge | Public domain

Boulonnais: The Sacrifice of Le Portel

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jose Capez, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sitting on the southern shoulder of Boulogne, the small commune of Le Portel was singled out by the Allies during the war for one of the cruelest tactical sacrifices of 1943. On the nights of 8 and 9 September, Bomber Command struck the village as part of Operation Cockade - an e...

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Image: Jose Capez | CC BY-SA 3.0

Boulonnais: Concrete Among the Cows

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pline, CC BY-SA 3.0. Walk the back lanes of the Boulonnais today and the war is still everywhere. Pillboxes squat among the hedgerows. The hill above Audinghen holds the colossal concrete dome of the Todt battery, built to launch shells across to Kent. Down on the beaches there are still German bunke...

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Image: Pline | CC BY-SA 3.0