WATER: Water Everywhere

Rudolf Abraham finds solace in the tranquil natural haven of northern France’s Audomarois wetlands

- Rudolf Abraham

The boat glides across a dark mirror of water, its surface dotted with the shiny green ellipses of lily pads and flecked here and there with bright yellow flowers. Banks thick with reeds and grasses, overhung with the trailing branches of weeping willows, move slowly past, and streaks of white cloud swim across a bright azure sky. The red eye of a great crested grebe flashes in the sunlight, before vanishing silently beneath the surface, leaving a ripple which is lost in our gentle wake.

This is the Marais Audomarois, the mystical wetlands surrounding the town of SaintOmer in northern France; a vast, watery landscape sprawling across an area of more than 3,700 hectares, crisscrossed by over 700km of watercourses, canals and channels. An incredibly rich environment for wildlife and plants, it also preserves a tradition of land use which has almost vanished everywhere else in France.

I’m in a traditional flat-bottomed wooden boat, known as a bacôve, following some of the waterways of the Marais Audomarois with ISNOR, which runs boat tours from Clairmarais, a little north-east of Saint-Omer. Visiting by boat is simply the best way to see these marshes (and still the only way to see some areas) up close, offering a completely different viewpoint and experience to seeing them from a road or embankment.

Manmade majesty

The Marais Audomarois is a manmade landscape. The low-lying basin of the River Aa, susceptible to frequent flooding in the Middle Ages, was gradually transformed by monks from the Benedictine Abbaye St-Bertin (founded by Audomar of Thérouanne, better known as Saint Omer), from at least as early as the 10th century. They extracted peat (several of the area’s étangs or lakes were formed in this way), dug drainage ditches and channels, and with the fertile soil removed from these, created areas for growing crops in between.