Ingress
Go east along Paris’ Champs-Élysée, almost as far as you can, until you reach the Luxor obelisk. Look down. You are walking the cliffs of Dielette. Granite mined here was transported to Paris to construct the Place de la Concorde and now the stone sits mute and unremarked upon beneath your feet. Closer to home, the town’s harbour began its life as its coastline. As Dielette-based artist Chris Walker tells me when I visit in mid-November, they re-arranged the cliffs to make the harbour. Waiting on the harbour to visit Chris’s studio I watch a cormorant, perched on a mooring post under a tan sky muted by mist, his short wings outstretched in the breeze. He is elevated above the pleasure boats and cobalt chop, like an ebony Christ. Corvus Maranus. Sea Raven. After each dive, he must take care to allow his plumage to dry, so he doesn’t become saturated and drown. I have come here looking for things which no longer exist. A quarry. A mine. A dragon. Even if things are real, they might not be there all the time.
Cormorant, Dielette, November 2021.
Beyond Dielette’s double harbour, which embraces the town as two shallow parenthesis, if you were to dive down to the bottom of the sea and then tunnel into the seabed, you would find a field of iron ore so rich that the crews of ships sailing overhead watch as their compass needles spin uselessly. We hold certain scientific truths, like magnetic north, to be inviolable but this place has its own magnetic field. The disorientating hum of it forces you to contemplate the things which draw us to them. The things from which are we repelled. It provokes the sensation of trying to bring two poles of the same magnet together, that fleshy, rubbery resistance.
In 1896 the mine fell silent, the cost of the incessant battle against the sea proving too much. Almost fifteen years pass before it is put into operation again.The horizontal tunnels within a mine are referred to as galleries, as distinct from vertical mine shafts. The word is also given to the tunnels made by moles and ants and other burrowing creatures. The art of excavation. Thinking about the abandoned galleries in that time, man-made spaces emptied of humans, provokes a vertiginous feeling. The physical impossibility of absence in the mind of someone human. What does a mine think about. In 1907, the mine was purchased by a majority German joint-stock company and roared into life again. Much of the ore extracted at Dielette was shipped to Germany, loaded onto large vessels via a system of off-shore cable cars. Once there the ore was smelted and and much of it turned into armaments. So the sons of Dielette, at the dawn of the First World War, are drawn to the Western Front and bombarded by their own exports, their native earth rearing up to kill them. The human body is 4% iron.
Iron miners, Dielette, 1930s
The men who mined Dielette’s iron ore fields after the First World War were not Normans. They were drawn here from Italy, Spain, Poland and Czechoslovakia, by the higher wages this kind of work commanded. The Flamanville football team, composed predominantly of the migrant mining workforce, was renowned across Normandy for its tenacity and aggression. I wonder if, on the pitch, in their strip of grass green,[1] they could still feel the weight of all that water bearing down, seeking admittance.
8th May 1927. A white bi-plane bearing the livery of a black heart containing a skull and crossbones, candles and a coffin, and escorted by four French military aircraft is sighted off the coast of Etrétat, Normandy. It is never seen again. The Oiseau Blanc, along with its pilots, decorated French fighter aces, disappears trying to fly non-stop between Paris and New York. France is plunged into mourning. Elsewhere in Manche, the iron mine at Dielette loses its most recent owner: one of the Oiseau Blanc’s pilots, Francois Coli.
Dielette’s under-sea galleries were almost continuously infiltrated by water. To keep the mine workable pumps ran twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If the pumps were to break, and the ingress continue unabated, the miners on shift had no more than twenty minutes to get back to the surface before the galleries were drowned. It is difficult for most of us to contemplate existence in an environment like this, entirely antithetical to human needs for air, for space, for light. When reading about it now the mine takes on the qualities of a myth. Its miners, like Orwell’s on the Wigan coal fields, become adjacent to the legendary or heroic.[2]
Offshore loading system and cargo ship.
The sea took back the mine at Dielette in the early 1960s, flooding the galleries for a final time. All that remains to indicate the it was ever there are the amputated stumps of the cable car platforms and the artificial reef which allowed large cargo vessels to bypass the town’s tiny harbour. Over the access shafts, offices and former storage areas now squats Centrale Nucléar Flamanville. Behind three layers of chain link and razor wire you can see the plant’s engineers milling back and forth, crowned with white hard hats. Flamanville is at the centre of a no-fly zone. Flights between Jersey and the Norman coast must go miles out of their way to land. Fighter jets scramble practice missions to defend it.
I finally gain admittance to Chris’s studio, a unit on the harbour, facing out to sea, into which the sun sets. His mural, a triptych depicting the history of Dielette, from the pre-Christian era to the present day, spans a wall of its own. It is Chris’s gift to the town, in return for this gallery space. There is no power to the studio and once the light fades his working day is over. He invites us home for tea. As the car winds surreptitiously up the shoulder of the village, sandwiched between the cliffs and the plant, Chris points out the car park which will act as the emergency assembly point, should we lose control of that which we have brought to the surface. On 27th of December 1999, a storm surge combined with winter tides to overwhelm the sea walls protecting the Baylais nuclear power plant, flooding parts of the complex. The loss of electricity knocked out numerous safety mechanisms. An emergency water cooling supply remained operational, the only thing which stood between Baylais and an international nuclear incident. If that had failed, the plant’s engineers would have had only ten hours before the four reactor cores began to meltdown.
Between 80-100 thousand tons of uranium make up the core of Pressurised Water Reactors, two of which are already running at Flamanville and providing around 4% of France’s electricity. These reactors were two of nearly 60 of their kind built here in the period between the late 1970s and 1990s as a reaction to the oil price shock. A new reactor began construction in 2007. As of 2021 it is more than five times over budget and years behind schedule. The design, a European Pressurized Reactor,[3] is the same as is being planned for use at Hinkley Point C in the UK. In the mural the powerplant glows with a gilt halo, like a catholic icon. This is a region heavily reliant on the nuclear industry economically, which provides around 1 in 2 jobs here. You have twenty minutes to evacuate. You have ten hours. You have no time at all.
Because something else has calcified beneath Centrale Nucléar Flamanville, alongside the last vestiges of the mine under the sea. [I imagine filing cabinets and ash trays from the abandoned offices, bobbing alongside pit lamps and explosive charges]. A fault in the granite of the Flamanville cliffs extending 100 meters below ground, at points nearly 20 meters high, the Trou de Baligan no longer exists. At high tide the earth seemed to roar as the sea was funnelled into the narrow channel. The blocks of stone which appear to pave it also protruded from its walls like unfinished gargoyles. A place of aural and optical illusions. Un trou: a hole, an aperture, a gap, an opening. Into that opening poured a legend of the dragon of Baligan, a seven-headed serpent who dwelt in the hole and feasted on the local population, appeased only by the sacrifice of the children of Dielette, one by one, once a year, once a month, once a week, depending on which version of the story you listen to. No time at all. Then, across the sea, comes Saint Germain. Saint Germain the Scot, Saint German of the Sea, Saint Germain of Normandy. Saint Germain of the Wheel, to slay the dragon and save the children of Dielette, body and soul, converting all who beheld his works to Christianity.[4] The serpent’s corpse petrified, turning into a lump of granite streaked with iron ore, a ferrous reminder of his monstrous appetites. And there he stayed, until, in 1980, the architects and engineers of Flamanville CNF conceived of their palace of industry and with it closed the trou forever. Yet the word trou can also mean ‘an eye’ and this is a place which feels both watched and watchful, that seems to flicker between states. CCTV cameras drape Flamanville CNF in a garland of lenses which flash our fog lights back at us as we leave the town. The half-life of a legend is impossible to calculate.
There are some stories it is impossible to tell from the beginning. Stories where words like ‘first’ and ‘then’ and ‘finally’ disintegrate under the complex tensions placed upon them by time. This is one of them. This is true in part because Dielette, and latterly Flamanville, are towns which have grown up around excavation, around what it is possible to bring to the surface. As above, so below? [5] Perhaps. Perhaps not. It is not an insignificant thing, to dig something out of the ground, to bring it into the world from its place of sedimentation and burial. It is difficult to know how it will react on the surface. What will fill the void its exhumation leaves behind.
[1] While working on his mural, Chris encountered the ancestor of one of Dielette’s iron miners, who had come to see the work in progress. The mural depicts players from the Dielette football team, at the bottom of its central panel. But Chris had a problem. All of his reference images were black and white. Dielette’s team colours remained a mystery. A few days after this encounter he arrived at his studio to find an envelope of colour photographs of the team in their kit, verdant green, with a white chevron at the throat.
[2] Until very recently, the surviving Dielette miners have congregated on the 1st weekend in December in an event organised by L'Association Histoire et patrimoine des mines et carrières de Flamanville-Diélette to commemorate mining activity in the region. A natural impulse, to want to look into faces that have seen what you have seen beneath the sea, felt the earth and its oceans shrug. The celebration coincides with the Feast of Saint Barbara.
[3] French newspaper L’Eclos refer to the ERP as ‘Enormous Problems to Resolve’.
[4] One of the attributes of St Germain á la Roule is a plough wheel, on which he is said to have sailed across the channel to liberate the pagan peoples of the Cotentin. It seems likely that Germain’s craft was in fact a coracle or curragh. In Walker’s mural, ‘The Three Ages of the Dragon of Baligan’, he sails to the rescue on the wheel of a chopper bicycle. The legacy of St Germain’s evangelism is found across the peninsula, where multiple churches bear his name, included a fortified example in the town of Barneville, whose tower allows you to watch for enemy ships advancing towards the coast.
[5] As above, so below: An idiomatic phrase associated with Hermetic mysticism. In a tarot deck, The Magician is associated with this sentiment. Everything is connected, mirrored. The Magician has all of the elements at his disposal. He is an adept, he can wield them in any way he wishes to. He is a conduit between the physical and the spiritual. It is this card I am put in mind of when I meet Chris Walker. In the Marseille tarot deck, The Magician is depicted with six fingers on his right hand rather than five, symbolic of his seeming ability to bend reality to his will, to manipulate and reorganise it. The Magician is the card of energy.