On the misspelling of place names….
One of my first Wapping’s Wanders, was to take a gaggle of Wanderers to France for the day, to see the battlefield of Azincourt and its small museum. It’s roughly 50 miles from Calais on the D roads; in other words about 100 miles there and back in a day. To help everyone, I made a GPX file, for bods to follow, so at least they’d have the destination.
Two of the Wanderers got lost. For some reason or another, they thought it would be better to not to tap the destination on my GPX route, but instead type in Agincourt, using the English spelling. One (very important) letter difference.
Agincourt in France, is close to Nancy. Nancy, is roughly 300 miles from Calais or, a return jounery (in a day) of 600 miles. Now, you’d might suppose that distance would start to set alarm bells ringing in our two heroes’ heads, but no….. off they set towards Nancy, via a direct route, using motorways. I think it was not until well after lunch, as they hooned ever further southwards, hurtling further and further away from Calais, that the lights in their noddles came on. Happy days.
PS The French, the last people you’d expect to mark the scene of one of history’s greatest defeats, have completed a multi-million pound remaking of the museum at Azincourt. I’ll go to see it before too long, as it’s supposed to be very good.
The French are planning a new commemoration to the battle of Agincourt. How should a museum depict a famous defeat?
www.bbc.co.uk
Though, the Franch also carefully mark the battlefield of Crécy too, another glorious defeat of France.
