Le Mesnil de Créances – Bed & Breakfast in Normandy

Bed & Breakfast amid a thousand years of history, a mile from golden beaches in a Regional Nature Park; halfway between Cherbourg and the Mont Saint-Michel, a few miles from the D-Day Beaches, Le Mesnil is an ideal base for ramblers, cyclists, golfers, ornithologists and holiday-makers alike, where a warm welcome and deep comfort are always available.

‘We never expected to find a place in Normandy where we felt at home – but we did! MG, California

‘A most relaxing, peaceful night. Thanks! DM, Bromsgrove, UK

‘Lovely house, lovely rooms. Lovely people around – what else do we need to have a good time? Lovely weather – and we had that, too! RL, Madrid.

‘We came here for a night’s rest and found ATMOSPHERE’ JM, Germany

‘Another wonderful experience in exploring France new and old. Many thanks to you! DB, Virginia

LE MESNIL DE CRÉANCES

is, according to a local historian, “at least a thousand years old”. The staircase tower (above) probably dates from the 12th century, contemporary with the Château de Pirou, two miles South.

All the bedrooms are accessible from the Hall (above left). Breakfast is served in the small dining room (right).

The Yellow room (left), fifteen feet square, has a double bed and a single, with room for a child’s folding bed. Its private bathroom has WC and shower. All bedrooms have private bathrooms to the North and windows to the South, overlooking the garden.

The Gallery Room (below left) has two single beds. There is a private shower and separate WC adjoining.

The Treasury Room (above right) has the best garden view of all. It is a large room with a four-poster bed. There is also space for a child’s bed. The en-suite bathroom has WC, basin and shower.

The East room (left) is similar to the Treasury room, but on the ground floor. It is a family room with a double bed and two bunks, and its en-suite bathroom has a bathtub rather than a shower.

NO SMOKING is permitted in the house

(but there's an ashtray on the terrace!)

Visitors have the use of well over an acre of garden, part of which remains a classic meadow with a labyrinth of paths among the wild flowers.

A Mesnil is the old word for a large farm or small country house, whose occupant – the Squire – was lower in the scale of nobility than the Seigneur of a Manoir. The Sieur du Mesnil controlled about a quarter of the area of Créances, and paid fealty to the Comte de Créances. In 1505 a member of the Guéroult family, which already held the lordship of another quarter, moved into the house and applied for a patent of nobility. It was probably this man who built the eastern half of the building, at the time a barn and a labourer’s cottage, now the Hall and the Gallery, Treasury and East rooms.

Originally, the downstairs ceilings were higher than they are now, and the space above was used only for storage. The windows of the East bathroom and the treasury bathroom were both fitted with iron bars on the outside. They would belong to the same ground-floor room, which must have been either a treasury or possibly the local lock-up.

The comparative importance of a Seigneur could be assessed by the number of pigeons he kept. Only noblemen were allowed to keep pigeons, which feed on other people's corn and thus represent a form of taxation. Some manor houses and châteaux in Normandy have vast pigeonniers capable of taking up to a thousand nests. Here at le Mesnil there are precisely two pigeon-holes, so the Sieur du Mesnil in the Middle Ages must have been just about as poor as a nobleman could get. In the Yellow Room, now, you can lie in bed and spy on the world outside through the pigeon-holes.

Créances is forty miles South of Cherbourg, on the West coast of the Cotentin peninsula. From Cherbourg, follow the signs to Rennes and Mont Saint-Michel as far as Lessay, where you turn right next to the Abbey Church and again just after it.

If you miss the turn off the N13 at Valognes for Mont Saint-Michel, never fear – go on to CARENTAN and pretend you were coming from Caen.

Coming from Caen, Rouen or Paris, leave the N13 at CARENTAN and follow signs to COUTANCES as far as Périers, where you should head for Lessay.

From Lessay, follow the signs to Créances. This involves a left turn after about a kilometre. Once in Créances, go straight on along the main street. Rue de la République is the second turning on the left after the CHAMPION supermarket. Once in Rue de la République, you will find Le Mesnil on the right after 350 yards.

From Coutances, head for Cherbourg. After the village of Montsurvent the road goes over one more hill, then into a five-mile straight. At the end of this, a sign welcomes you to the Parc Naturel Régional, and the turn to Créances is on the left soon afterwards. This road leads to the church in Créances, where you turn left. Again, Rue de la République is second left after CHAMPION.

From the coast road, follow signs from the roundabout to Créances Bourg and turn right at the church.

For visiting Americans, there is a good rail service from Paris to Cherbourg, the nearest stop to Créances being at Carentan. Hire cars can be arranged in advance, as Hertz, Budget and Avis all have offices near the station in both Caen and Cherbourg. Picking up a hire car from airport or Gare du Nord, so that your first French driving is done in Paris of all places, is not advised! Far simpler to take the train to Caen or Cherbourg. Train tickets can be booked in advance on SNCF.com. A convenient shuttle service from the airports to Paris destinations (including Saint-Lazare), at a fixed fee and with English-speaking drivers, is supplied by france-hotels at http://www.france-hotels.net. The same people will book you an hotel in Paris if you need to stay overnight.

Note: when arranging car hire in advance, remember that everything outside Paris closes on Sunday and public holidays, and from 12 till 2 daily. Experience has also taught us to spell out CAEN, as otherwise you can find that your car is waiting for you in Cannes! Finally, remember that automatic cars are very rare in France and need to be specially requested.

CRÉANCES is an ideal centre from which to visit Lower Normandy. Situated on the route South from Cherbourg, on the edge of the Regional Nature Park of the Cotentin Marshes, the village itself offers country walks and interest for the nature lover, and its varied habitats – marsh, moorland and estuary – are home to a bewildering variety of birds.

A number of rare species of wild flower can be found in the area, such as Spiranthes aestivalis, the Summer Ladies’ Tresses orchid (left), extinct in England but flourishing in the Forest of Lessay. The vast sandy beach stretching past Créances Plage, Armanville and Pirou Plage, with its views of Jersey and the bluest of blue sea, is used by both surfers and sand yachts, and the highest tides in Europe encourage the cultivation of oysters and mussels. Behind the beach, there are miles of sand dunes to explore. The carrots of Créances are known throughout France for their rich flavour. They are grown organically in rich, deep sandy soil and fed with local seaweed. Leeks, too, are a local product, and there are also onions and potatoes. If you like soup, come to Créances!

Within a fifty-mile radius of Créances you can visit Mont Saint-Michel, Caen, Bayeux, the Normandy invasion beaches and the Norman Switzerland. The whole of the Cotentin peninsula is at your disposal; the cliffs of La Hague, the mild fruitfulness of the Val de Saire, picturesque villages like Barfleur; romanesque abbeys like Cerisy-la-Salle and Lessay (only two miles from Créances); the great gothic cathedral crowning the hilltop of Coutances; the superb horses of the National Stud at Saint-Lô; the bell-foundry and copper workshops of Villedieu-les-Poêles; the resorts of Barneville-Carteret and Granville (Monaco of the North), and the simple delights of miles of sweet countryside and empty roads.

xe.com Universal Currency Converter™

Convert this amount	of this type of currency	into this type of currency.
enter any amount	scroll down to see more currencies	scroll down to see more currencies

Universal Currency Converter service and trade mark under license from xe.com. Terms of Use

RESERVATION

We will be happy to greet you at Le Mesnil for a holiday or just for a night.

Room for 1 person: 40€ (265F) per night. For 2 people 48€ (315F); extra person (5 years and over) 8€ (53F).

WINTER MONTHS ONLY: Bed, Breakfast and EVENING MEAL 1 person 55€ (360F); 2 people 65€ (430F); 3 people 82.50€ (545F); 4 people 100€ (660F)

7 nights charged as for 6, 14 as for 12. To book, write to us at

LE MESNIL DE CRÉANCES, 150 Rue de la République, 50710 CRÉANCES, France

or telephone: +33 (0)2 33 47 85 35: email Booking@lemesnil.com, or fax us on +33 (0)2 33 46 79 88.

Simplest method of booking is by email - we pick up the mail 3 times a day.

OR simply press the button and book on line! (supplement 8 euro per room)

CURRENCY CONVERTER (constantly updated)

Perhaps you would like us to reserve you a table for dinner on the evening of your arrival.

There are several restaurants not far from Le Mesnil:

LA CHAUMIÈRE is just up the road, within easy walking distance, welcoming and friendly, serving a fairly basic menu, but well cooked. Outside the main tourist season, meals are only served at lunchtime.

LA NEUSTRIE is a mile and a half away, on the coast road (easy to find!), and offers a limited menu of superbly-cooked meals, along with a selection of light snacks, sandwiches etc. The latest addition is a grill on which Claude can cook steaks and seafood over a wood fire. Claude and Chantal Piron are very friendly and helpful, and all our guests enjoy their evenings. Nobody speaks English, but enormous quantities of goodwill, accompanied by sign language and sound effects, remove all problems.

Both the above have menus in English.

LA MER is at Pirou-Plage, 2 miles away, on a terrace overlooking the sea and the sunset, and specialises in seafood from the boats that come past its door. This is a very fine restaurant, not expensive, but very occasionally intolerant of languages other than French. Expect to remain at table from 8 till 11.30.

LA PIZZA is directly opposite La Mer, a friendly little bar/restaurant with a good menu (try the Moules Marinières) besides, of course, pizzas to eat in or take away. Very little English spoken, but this doesn't seem to be a difficulty.

LA MARÉE is two doors away, and cooks over an open wood fire in the dining-room. The selection of salads is particularly good, too, and they have interesting English translations on the menu. Some difficulty has been experienced in the past by non-French speakers.

Also visiting the Paris area?

B&B near Paris, and Apartments in Paris:

Meredith Sykes and Bill Graham

Bed & Breakfast of the Champagne Route

Rue des Vaches, 02850 Reuilly-Sauvigny, France

To send email click on mailto:bgms@hexanet.fr

To see B&B webpage click on http://www.marneweb.com/bnb

To see Paris apartments description, click on http://www.marneweb.com/bnb/apt_desc.htm

Cherbourg

P&O Portsmouth offer a five-hour ferry service from Portsmouth to Cherbourg with the Pride of Hampshire and Pride of Cherbourg, which are neither modern nor particularly comfortable, and a fast service with the Portsmouth Express, which gets across in under 3 hours at speeds up to 43 knots, but which, while modern, is distinctly uncomfortable in any sort of sea. Brittany Ferries sail the modern and comfortable Barfleur from Poole to Cherbourg in just over four hours, and have just introduced a fast catamaran which covers the distance in two hours.

Cherbourg used to be the port of departure for transatlantic liners (including the Titanic), and its deep-water berth still frequently hosts cruise ships. The port is the world’s biggest artificial harbour, and was a major objective for the allied forces after D-day.

The town of Cherbourg is charming; not too large, with pedestrian streets, picturesque quaysides and good shopping, and a spectacular view from the Fort du Roule on its cliff above the town. The newly-opened Cité de la Mer, in the old transatlantic terminal, is a spectacular sealife centre, with a vast aquarium and even a submarine to visit. Nuclear submarines are, in fact, still built in Cherbourg.

Cherbourg is less than an hour’s drive from Créances.

Le Mont Saint-Michel

The most visited monument in France consists of a golden angel on top of a spire on top of a church on top of a monastery on top of a citadel on top of a village on top of a fortress on top of a car park. English people ask, ‘Isn’t it a bit like St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall?’ – and so it is, just as the Statue of Liberty is a bit like a table lamp. During nine months of the year, the tiny streets at the base of the rock are horribly overcrowded and disfigured by a myriad souvenir shops; but as one climbs, the crowds thin out, the monastic calm takes over and the charm and beauty of the place make themselves felt.

Within the next few years, the car park which disfigures the Mont will be returned to the sea, and the island will be reborn, approached by a simple new bridge from the mainland. This will give new life to a site which has inspired visions of romantic cities from Malory to Tolkien.

Le Mont Saint-Michel is less than fifty miles from Créances.

Parc Naturel Régional des Marais du Cotentin et du Bessin

Thousands of years ago, the Cotentin peninsula was an island. Where the sea cut it off from the mainland, the estuaries of numerous rivers – Vire, Taute, Douve and Aure on the Eastern side, and the Ay here on the West – are surrounded by a rich variety of habitat: fenland, marsh, water-meadow, estuary, pinewood, dunes and bocage, the typical Norman countryside of small fields surrounded by hedgerows and seamed with sunken roads. A rich variety of flora and fauna can be observed in the protection of a 70,000-acre Park which stretches from Créances across to the neighbouring Département du Calvados. There are seals in the Baie des Veys near Carentan and Isigny, and above all thousands of birds: Teal, waders, oyster-catchers, curlew, buzzards, tern, storks, and migratory birds of all kinds.

Most of the park is open to visitors at all times: many nature trails and signed walks are available, and there are dozens of local centres and craft workshops. Visits can be arranged to five of the six protected areas. New observatories have just been opened overlooking the marshes at Les Ponts d’Ouve, half an hour’s drive from Créances.

Pirou

Pirou is the next village South from Créances. Like most villages in the area, it comes in several widely-separated parts (Créances is divided into more than a dozen small hamlets). Pirou Bourg is less than a mile from Le Mesnil. At Pirou Pont the Château, founded by Vikings and rebuilt in the twelfth century, is well worth a visit for its rooftop walks and impressive defences. Pirou Plage is a thriving holiday resort and the centre of the shellfish industry in a region which takes advantage of the highest tides in Europe to produce half of France’s shellfish. A number of seafood restaurants can be found at Pirou-Plage, and there is a splendid market on Sunday mornings. Tractors trundle through the village street and across the golden beach to the oyster and mussel beds at low tide, returning with their catch and usually a load of seaweed, the natural fertiliser of the local fields.

Lessay

Sleepy little Lessay, with its wonderful Abbey church dating from the time of William the Conqueror, wakes up with a start for three days on the second weekend in September every year, when the everyday population of 2,000 is swollen by 350,000 visitors to the annual Holy Cross Fair. The Champ de Foire at Lessay, for those three days, becomes the biggest shop in Europe.

Lessay is just over two miles North of Créances.

Villedieu-les-Poêles

The name means ‘Town-of-God-the-frying-pans’, and if you need pots and pans, you couldn’t go to a better place. Villedieu is full of little workshops where coppersmiths beaver away at all sorts of vessels in copper, brass and pewter. You can also visit one of the biggest and oldest the bell-foundries in France. The church contains a number of examples of the fine post-war stained glass of this part of Normandy.

Granville

Though its assumed title of ‘Monaco of the North’ may be a little over the top (mind you, there’s a casino and an aquarium and some very nice rocks, and the sea here is always of the deepest blue), Granville is nevertheless a major holiday resort with many attractions. Don’t miss the view from the Pointe du Roc, or the busy activities of the fishing fleet; stroll in the medieval streets of the Old Town on its hilltop, the walls still intact even to drawbridges and watchtowers. The beach, like all those in the Département de la Manche, is sandy and clean, but it’s unusually small and you have to arrive early to find a parking space anywhere near it. There are fine stretches of beach, however, at the smaller resorts on either side of the town. On the clifftops perch a series of luxurious holiday villas, including the one (above) where Christian Dior spent part of his childhood. Villa and gardens now form a Dior Museum.

Granville is about an hour’s drive from Créances. A good day out can be had by making the round trip to Granville and Villedieu-les-Poêles, taking in the zoo at Champrépus between the two.

Coutances

Coutances is our Cathedral town, spectacularly built on a steep rock amid a saucer of hills. The crest of the ridge is crowned by three great medieval churches: St.-Nicolas, of the earliest Gothic in style; the Cathedral, the acknowledged masterpiece of Norman Gothic; and Saint-Pierre, late Gothic and Renaissance. Besides these, the greatest glory of the town is its park, the Jardin des Plantes, originally the private garden of the house which is now the town museum. Here, a formal French garden with fountains and floral sculptures is surrounded by an English garden full of shady walks and winding paths, in its turn surrounded by a belt of virgin woodland. The contrasts and the views afforded by this inspired landscaping are worth travelling a long way to see.

Nevertheless, Coutances is only fifteen miles South of Créances.

Bayeux

Well, yes, the Tapestry, of course. The French call it ‘La Tapisserie de la Reine Mathilde’, we call it the Bayeux tapestry; needless to say, it was not made by Queen Matilda, it did not originate in Bayeux and it isn’t a tapestry. It’s an embroidered strip cartoon, probably produced in England soon after the conquest, and designed as propaganda to legitimise William’s claim to the English crown. I especially like the bit where the two armies are preparing for battle; the English have weapons and food, the Normans have weapons and wine.

Nevertheless, there’s a lot more to see in Bayeux; an excellent Battle of Normandy museum next to the vast Commonwealth War Cemetery; a Cathedral which reads from bottom to top like a history of Norman architecture; a host of small museums and galleries, a lace museum and very good shopping .. Bayeux was the luckiest town in Normandy in 1944; liberated on the evening of D-day, it suffered practically no damage in an area where most towns were completely destroyed. A maze of medieval streets can, therefore, still be explored.

All this less than an hour’s drive from Créances.

Caen

is our nearest Big City. Thoroughly devastated during the war, it yet retains a good deal of interest: excellent shopping, of course, especially at the two out-of-town shopping centre, Hérouville Saint-Clair to the North and Mondeville 2 to the South; and a host of restored medieval churches, including (above) the Abbaye aux Hommes, with the tomb of William the Conqueror; the Abbaye aux Dames with that of his Queen, Matilda, and in the centre of the city Saint-Pierre, a masterpiece of the Flamboyant Gothic. Next to Saint-Pierre is the enormous and rambling Castle. There are museums and galleries all over town, but the most important is the MEMORIAL, a Museum for Peace entirely appropriate to one of the places where war has been at its worst.

Caen is just over fifty miles from Créances; a long day out may be made by going there on the main road (N13) and coming back along the coast road, taking in the British invasion beaches and the Mulberry harbour at Arromanches, then Omaha beach and the US cemetery and memorials in that sector, ending with a call on the sweet little town of Carentan (right).

The Créances Carrot

A Festival with Roots

Créances is on the West coast of the Cotentin peninsula, about ten miles north of Coutances. The population of the village is about two thousand in the winter, perhaps five thousand in the Summer, and a whole lot more on the second Saturday in August, when the whole region turns up to celebrate the Feast of the Carrot.

Something over a thousand years ago, the village was on the seashore. Nowadays the beach is a mile from the church. As the coastline silted up, the locals carved little fields (called mielles) out of the dunes it left behind, and enriched the sand with constant applications of seaweed. After a few centuries of this, the soil is rich, deep and incredibly fertile, and produces leeks, onions, pumpkins, shallots, and above all the finest carrots in France, the Carotte des sables nourrie d'algues marines.

You don't believe it? Ah, but the fact is incontestable. Eight years ago Créances was granted the only Appelation d'origine for carrots. Go into any supermarket, you'll see French carrots marked either Origine France or Origine Créances. Buy the latter, grate them, eat them raw. They are as juicy as peaches, straight and crisp, and the locals are proud of them. And I mean really proud.

Once a year, then, they celebrate the carrot. There are floats piled high with produce, contests for the finest (judged on taste, not size), and the ceremonies and procession of the Confrérie des Môgeous de la Bonne Carotte des Sables.

Môgeou is a local word, part of the patois that calls the village Crianches. In plain fact, it means mangeur, eater; but in this context its nearest English equivalent would be Panjandrum. The Panjandra of Créances wear carrot-coloured robes and (of course) green hats, and everything about them resembles the wine brotherhoods of Burgundy except for the tongue, which is worn firmly in the cheek.

They parade solemnly through the village with a secret smile hiding just behind their eyes, and then put away the robes for another year and get back on their tractors for the back-breaking labour of getting three crops a year out of tiny, windswept patches of sand. Planting leeks requires the co-operation of the whole family, six people sitting abreast on the back of a Heath Robinson machine, bent double and thrusting plantlets into the soil. In the old days, Créances men always married local girls because outsiders weren't bred to the labour. To this day, twenty surnames cover half the population; Lemoigne, Lesigne, Fromage, Jacquet, Letouzé. Like the Joneses of a Welsh village, they have nicknames to distinguish them. It doesn't help that most of the women are christened Marie.

Once a year, they all get to let their hair down. There's the procession, and a special church service, and a Grand Bal Populaire and a bouncy castle in the supermarket car park; this year (12 August) we have an exhibition of old farm equipment; but like most Norman feasts, the Fête de la Carotte is principally a big excuse to sell things to each other. Five hundred stalls line all the streets of the centre, some run by professional junk dealers, some by individuals clearing their attics. The children have a special corner by the church, selling last year's Christmas presents and buying the ones they wished they'd been given in the first place. Between the stalls, the band from La Haye du Puits plays brassy versions of old dance hits, while local folklore groups gyrate in Grandma's costume. Twenty thousand visitors – ten times the population – wander the streets.

In the old days, the people of Créances lived on soup. Some still do, with a stock-pot constantly on the go on an old cooker in the shed, full of carrots and leeks and ham and lard. Soup for breakfast, soup for dinner, with bread to mop it up and push it down. Nowadays, lunch will be more expansive; and it won't include carrots. They may produce the best carrots in the world, but eat them? Raw? What do you think we are – Parisians?

Val de Saire

This top right-hand (sorry, North-eastern) corner of the Cotentin peninsula produces early vegetables, especially salads and cabbages; all round the Cotentin our maritime climate protects us from the extremes of winter. The wind, mainly from the West, is a problem, which is why most of the hedges in the Val de Saire run from North to South. Driving North from Utah Beach, one comes across a profusion of manor-houses, a preserved German Battery at Crisbec, a fine viewpoint at Quettehou, an extensive yacht marina at Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue and two notable places: the island of Tatihou, a maritime museum whose entry fee includes the boat trip to get there, and the village of Barfleur (right)

, one of two in the Département de la Manche (the other is Mont Saint-Michel) to be listed among the Most Beautiful Villages in France.

La Hague

This is the North-western corner of the Cotentin, a granite outcrop very similar to Brittany or Cornwall, with tiny winding roads and houses huddled into valleys out of the wind. The painter Millet came from Gréville, and the poet Jacques Prévert spent his last years in a house behind Port-Racine, the smallest port in France. Prévert’s garden is open to visitors. The extreme tip, Cap de la Hague, is rocky but flat; Goury with its enormous lighthouse, sailor’s memorial and lifeboat station is worth a visit. Don’t miss the Nez de Jobourg (above), which claims to be France’s highest cliff, and the entrancing Baie d’Écalgrain which nestles beneath it. There’s even a nuclear power station at Flamanville which can be visited (I found it fascinating) and a reprocessing plant at La Hague where the rare guided tours are restricted to those of French nationality.

From Créances, go North on the Tourist Road to Portbail, Barneville-Carteret (where the cliffs begin), Les Pieux and into La Hague – about thirty miles. From there, one can return via Cherbourg and the market town of Bricquebec whose vast medieval castle enshrines a 3-star hotel with an excellent restaurant.

Suisse Normande

The Valley of the Orne includes this picturesque region, well worth a day trip. It calls itself the Norman Switzerland despite having no mountains. In fact, the area is a plateau with a deep valley – spectacularly deep in places, such as the Roche d’Oëtre, where the garden of a roadside café suddenly stops and confronts the startled visitor with a 300-foot drop. Along the river are sweet villages, and the Lac de Rabodanges is a centre for water sports and water play of all kinds.

Most of the Suisse Normande is within 60 miles of Créances. One can include a visit to Falaise, birthplace of William the Conqueror, and visit the wash-house where his father, Robert the Devil, first saw La Belle Arlette, who became mother of William the Bastard after what the French call ‘the most brief of delays’.

Saint-Lô

Créances is in the Département de la Manche, and the Chef-lieu or County Town of the Département is Saint-Lô. On D-Day the Allied Air Forces bombed all major road junctions, and a thousand aircraft completely destroyed Saint-Lô in a single twenty-minute raid. This effectively blocked the approach routes for German reinforcements, but unfortunately the one aircraft that missed the town was the one dropping warning leaflets. Civilian loss of life was immense. The town walls, grounded in solid rock, survived, and one tower of the Parish Church.

The best thing to visit in Saint-Lô, however, is the Haras National. This is one of 26 establishments founded by Napoleon – a National Stud to provide horses for his army. In the summer there are still 130 stallions at Saint-Lô, and they can be visited daily. On Summer Thursdays the stallions are shown off to visitors, both in hand and in harness. This is not on any account to be missed by anybody who likes horses – or, for that matter, those less interested. The very best of anything is always worth seeing.

Saint-Lô is thirty miles from Créances. One of my favourite day trips is Créances – Carentan – Bayeux, then via the Château at Balleroy (right), owned by the American Forbes family and the scene of a fabulous Balloon Festival every other year in June, to Saint-Lô and home via Périers.