Somme

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…..the department takes its name from the river which waters it.

“Lethargically” one feels like adding.  For the Somme is a slow-moving river, winding its weed-choked way through a peat-bottomed valley below beech woods and bare chalk downland.  The countryside, too, is slow-moving, under the gaze of the traveller who takes one of the long Roman roads which radiate north-east, east, and south-east from Amiens.  Low plateaux and ridges, separated by the shallow valleys of the Somme’s tributaries, the Aire, Ancre, Noye, Avre, Buce, succeed each other monotonously, devoid of hedges and almost of woodland, thickly populated, intensely cultivated.  Between the Noye and the Somme itself, in the plain of Santerre, the land is completely flat and yields the most characteristic of the department’s crops, sugar beet, dull to contemplate, heavy to work, rich to harvest.  In September the roads of the Santerre are slippery with mud (“Attention! – Betteraves”) when the clay-smeared beet are hauled to the little refineries whose tall, single chimneys mark the villages of the plain; in October the refinery owners summon their neighbours to shoot partridge and hare among the furrows and sit down in the evening a hundred strong to eat the bag; in November enormous ploughs emerge from machinery sheds to be dragged on cables between stationery traction engines across the mile-wide fields.  The pace of life on the Somme is as slow as its rivers, as regular as its natural features.

- John Keegan, The Face of Battle, 1976

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Aare

Length:  ?? km / ?? miles
Catchment:  ?? km2 / ?? miles2

We have the river Aare which is on your europe list but not live so i really should do it.  its bloody wonderful and is fresh out of the alps
when it gets to us so is a beautiful pale green at this time of the year.  just working up to having my first 2007 swim in it but was about
12C a couple of weeks ago and the weather has since dipped.  have attached a photo of one of my favourite places.  would like to do a bit on it so will put it on my list of things to do..

email from Sally - 8/5/07

and then this weekend i saw the aletsch glacier so you should have a photo of  that too, and you can put it on the site as its ice, and i dont know the name of the river it runs into.  and contrary to popular belief its not always wonderful here, but i wouldn't be anywhere else.  the snow was on the grimsel pass east of the jungfrau, and so its just the other two that are the aare.  walked along it in bern on friday night and its so high and so fast, incredible to see.  they're actually  advising people not to go on it as it really is dangerous.

email from Sally - 17/07/07

Photos at: Aare

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