moulins

Besides collecting befries, Michael and I collected moulins, or mills. Two windmills and one water mill, to be exact. As co-pilot, he spotted the first one on the map, and away we went to find the Moulin de Saint-Maxent. The explanation on the website is poorly translated, and it's unclear to me why the miller broke his millstone when the Germans were here.


A couple of days later, we stumbled upon another. Following a very small hand-painted sign that simply said, "moulin," we drove the winding road outside of Eaucourt-sur-Somme. The first mill I saw was an éolienne - just like we have on the wind farms of Western Oklahoma. Michael pointed out that the new mills would be logically placed on the same sites as the old ones, so we trudged on. Finally, we found what we were looking for. The Moulin Guidon was recently restored, and is served as a reference point for boats, because it can be seen from the Channel ports. In fact, if you look in one direction, you can see the sea, and in the other, the bell tower of the Amiens Cathedral.

Our third mill, which was recommended to us by the guide at the Abbaye de Valloires, turned out to be on the banks of the Authie river, on the border of Picardy and Nord-Pas de Calais While not a windmill, the Moulin de Maintenay is still a nice addition to our collection. It was given to the Cistercian monks of the Abbey in 1197, and they continued to use it until the 18th Century, when it was bombed and subsequently put up for sale. In the mid 19th Century, it was purchased by a family who continued to make flour until after WWII. It then became a sawmill until the 1970s.