Road to Home 2023 Day 8: Amettes - Bruay-la-Buissière (Parc d'Oulhain)

I walk because I am an anarchist; I can't abide rules. Walking is practically the only human activity that has not in one way or another been regulated. There are no rules; a walker simply puts one foot in front of the other and, within reason, goes and stops where he or she pleases.

- Brian Mooney, A long way for a pizza: On foot to Rome

The Via Francigena can become anarchic after Amettes. There are different ways to go, different places to stop for the night. An alternate route takes you directly to Arras in two (fairly long) days of walking, with an overnight stop at a castle whose owner, in addition to renting rooms to tourists, takes in pilgrims. Friends who have walked this route in the past recommended this route, and my Canadian fellow walkers were going that way. A day shaved off your walking time, and a night in a castle: What's not to like?

But because I am an anarchist too, I decided to go against the trend and walk the official Via Francigena/GR145 route through the grimy mining villages of the Artois. It seemed appropriate as I am following in the footsteps of a coal miner, my great-grandad, walking from the Yorkshire village where he was born to the battlefield where he died and is buried.

Besides, I have found affordable places to stay both nights, the second only a couple of hours' walk outside of Arras, giving me plenty of time to explore the city when I get there, two days from now.

So after breakfasting in the dining room of Colette's home in Amettes,  I packed up and headed out of the village in the direction of Ferfay along the Chemin des Morts, the "path of the dead", so called because back in the days when Ferfay didn't have its own church, the dead would be carried along this path to be buried in Amettes. In Ferfay I found a bakery that was open on a Sunday morning, and was so busy looking at the window display that I missed the turn-off onto the Sentier de Burbure. I realised my mistake right away, and in the meantime a woman pulled up in her car and asked if I was walking the Via Francigena. She was a long-distance walker herself, about to depart for Spain to walk the Camino del Norte! I recognised the excitement and anticipation in her eyes. She wished me a good walk, and I wished her one, and we each went our separate ways. A pleasant encounter that would not have taken place had I not made a wrong turn!

The church of Saint-Riquier, in Lozinghem

It was raining by the time I reached Lozinghem, so I sat on a bench in a glass bus shelter to eat my lunch, consisting of what was left of the hummus and raw vegetables (after sharing it with the others at the hostel in Amettes last night, as an appetiser before the choucroute my French roommates had prepared) and the remainder of my Maroilles cheese (said French roommates having commented that I had purchased the stinkiest cheese in France) with crackers and an apple. It was still raining when I finished, so I struggled into another layer of waterproofing - plastic trousers and bright orange rain poncho - and set off again. This technique worked like a charm: the rain stopped almost instantly!

At 30 kilometres, today's stage was long enough to include a great variety of terrain, from farming country to woodland and several mining villages, row upon row of identical brick houses, looking every bit as grim on this dull, grey day as their counterparts in northern England. (My great-grandfather must have felt at home....) Though the miners' cottages here do have a bit of a French twist, an attempt to do fancy things with the brickwork or add a few coloured tiles here and there! And the villages seemed well-designed, with facilities such as community centres and schools for the miners' families. In Marles-les-Mines I passed a large red brick school dated 1925 and an impressive town hall bearing the date 1933.

Coal was mined in the Pas-de-Calais area between 1720 and 1994, and the region contributed more than its share to the wealth of the nation with 124 mining towns and villages, 17 pits, 54 km of railway lines (some of which I walked along today, as they have been converted into hiking and biking trails), 51 slag heaps, known locally as terrils, and a long list of accidents. I walked past a memorial at the site of one of these, the 1975 Terril 6 disaster.  

In the middle of the night on 26 August 1975, terril 6 in Calonne-Ricouart caught fire and exploded, killing six people, destroying 47 homes and covering 3 hectares of land in burning ash. According to witnesses, the ground became so hot that firefighting trucks could not approach: their tyres melted. Click here to view 1975 television footage reporting on the incident.

The terrils were once considered ugly reminders of a dirty industrial past, but now they are protected heritage sites, monuments to the labour of the region's coal miners over the course of three centuries. They are nature parks, as hardy pioneering plant species take root in the shale, despite the poverty of organic material. There is even a vineyard planted on a terril, producing a wine appropriately named Charbonnay (charbon being French for coal).

Several mining villages and slag heaps later, I arrived on the outskirts of Bruay-la-Buissière, a former coal-mining town with a population of around 20,000 people. The town is sadly famous for what is known as the affaire de Bruay-en-Artois. On April 6, 1972, the beaten and strangled body of Brigitte Dewèvre, a shy, bespectacled 15-year-old girl from a modest coal-mining family, was found on a grassy slope separating a working-class street from the grounds of a villa owned by the fiancé of a wealthy notary who represented the interests of the coal mining company. The notary and his partner were arrested but later released, blaming the murder on a schoolmate of the victim; the resulting court case divided France in the summer of 1972, pitting the working class against the bourgeois. The case was never settled, and was only definitively filed as unresolved in 2005. Read about the affair in a 1972 article published in the New York Times.   

The Via Francigena passes the edge of the town, now known as Bruay-la-Buissière as the two municipalities of Bruay and Labuissière have been combined into one. Most walkers turn off the trail to seek accommodations in the town, but I had decided to go a little farther, following a dirt track along a former railway line through the trees to the village of Houdain. As it was beginning to rain again I ignored the trail skirting around the edge of the town and took a shortcut straight through it on the main road before meeting the Via Francigena again, heading back into the fields and scrambling up a very muddy/chalky path (can you imagine white mud?) through the woods into Parc d'Oulhain, a privately owned adventure park featuring playgrounds, mini-golf, tennis courts,  a swimming pool, a campground and... a hostel/hotel, which was what interested me!  

Despite the blustery weather, families were strolling about the park and children were getting themselves soaked playing in/on nets strung up among the trees, like so many damp spiders. After a 30 kilometre day I was thrilled to see the hostelry appear before me, and to receive a Via Francigena stamp on my pilgrim credential and the key to a large room with a giant bed in it and a view of the playground. It's a wheelchair accessible room so there is plenty of space for hanging up my wet clothes, and plenty of rails to hang them over! The wheelchair accessible shower turned out to be ideal for washing the mud off my waterproof trousers. And the cafeteria is open for dinner, too!

Today's accommodations: La Résidence du Parc d'Olhain

Amettes - Parc d'Oulhain 30.5 km

Red pins show where I was two nights ago and where I'll be tomorrow  - if all goes according to plan!