Le
Marais Audomarois... Géographie
The
regional Natural reserve offers a range of landscapes varied, located
between the highlands of Artois and the Flemish plain. While borrowing
the valleys which delimit it, that of Hem in North and especially, to
the South, that of Aa, one passes - while skirting capricious rivers accompanied
by wood and the hedges - urban and industrial horizons (paper mills of
Aa) to rural landscapes to the tortuous reliefs, often crowned forests
which underline of yellow and ochre the slopes of calcicoles lawns. Cleared
countries, alternating valleys wet and of the woodlands and soft small
valleys dug by temporary rivers, the campaigns of the back-country audomarois
are also characterized by their local architecture, where the brick yields
it soon to the heavy hardcores calcareous stone. Between the two valleys,
the slopes of Saint-Omer and the high plateau of Artois present a landscape
more stripped, undulating with the liking of the small valleys which go
down towards the marsh. There, along the slopes, the sloped roads and
the linear villages are spread out at the rate/rhythm of the bell-towers
which punctuate the horizon. The curtains limestones which learnedly organize
the circuit of descent of water, source of erosion on these rich person
let us file, striate the landscape with lines élégantes.Récolte
of cauliflowers in the marsh.
The
general slope directs water towards the basin of the marsh audomarois,
fixed well between these slopes, the first undulations of the mounts of
Flanders, the bottleneck of the Mount of Watten and the hillock of the
forest of Clairmarais, as many view-points open on a single landscape
in its kind. Water in these boggy hollows is announced in one hundred
ways. There, it comes out of under the limestones layers. Here, it levels
in the vast network of the water gangs, historical fruit of a slow labour
of development since the fringes cèches. Sometimes, it runs indifferent
to the neighbourhoods in the channels, sometimes it is spread out in the
ponds of peat workers. In all the cases it is expressed in the landscape
by a whole vegetable procession (willow plantations, pastures, truck farming)
and architectural (links, dams and valves) laid out with the feet of the
hillock of Saint-Omer. The agglomeration audomaroise articulates all these
landscapes besides, defending the input of the valleys, overhanging the
marshes. The abbeys established on Saint-Omer controlled great work of
draining of the marshes. How to be astonished then by the narrow overlap
which maintain here the city and the campaigns?
