Mont Cassel

On the "Wipers 2" trip our first stop was ostensibly for a coffee and this extended to frites for lunch and then a walk up to Mont Cassel to walk off a few of the calories.

The steps up to the heights above the town are a bit overgrown and in UK with our greater "Elf and safety" culture they would have been closed years ago. The French get on with it and even let their dogs crap on them too.

Talking of closed. At the top is huge hotel building boarded up and decaying. The Mont is in fact a narrow ridge, no more than 100 metres across at the top. On both sides are panorama tables pointing out places locally and fancifully, places further afield like New York, London and Leeds.

There is also a windmill that judging by the electric sound was not being powered by the wind any more. The plain below is littered with mills.

During WW1, Cassel was the HQ of the British Army fighting in the Flanders area. The statue is to Marshal Foch, who took over Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies in Spring 1918 and led the Allies defend against the "Kaiser's Offensive" that Spring and then the Allied attacks that forced the Germans back to almost the pre-1914 point.