Exploring Napoleonic Battlefields

Jan and I had spent many a happy summer holiday walking Napoleonic battlefields throughout Europe.   This had been partly inspired by reading Don Featherstone’s book “On Campaign with Wellington and Featherstone”.   This excellent book has a chapter on each of Wellington’s campaigns and battles, and a short summary of Featherstone’s visits to each of the battlefields.

Having started the two blogs about our current interests, I thought it would be a good idea to record our visits to the battlefields.   I had kept a photo album of each of the holidays, together with notes of the battlefields, so it would be relatively easy to create a blog of each holiday.

Waterloo 1971

This was our first visit to a Napoleonic battlefield.   We were serving in Germany at the time, and Waterloo was only four hours drive.   We had been wargaming (and married) or two years, and had just seen the iconic film Waterloo.   I had done months research and we had a great holiday.   This was a  good one to start with, because it was also the easiest battlefield to explore.

Spain and Portugal 1991

Twenty years later I read Don Featherstone’s book and was determined to follow in his footsteps to the Peninsula.  But I was not confident enough to do it on my own.  So we booked the holiday with Holts Tours.   An expensive way to do it, but well worth every penny.   We drove from Lisbon to Madrid by coach and visited many battlefields on the way.  

Spain and Portugal 1994

The Holts Tour gave me the confidence to plan a self-drive holiday.   This was before the days of easy internet access and booking online.   We had to book accommodation through a travel agent and were restricted to 4 star hotels and Parador’s.  Again expensive, but a great experience.   We flew to Lisbon, collected a hire car and drove north to Busacco, east to Salamanca and back to Oporto to fly home.   The holiday was “interesting”, as we spoke not a word of Spanish or Portuguese.  And we were far from southern Portugal favoured by the UK tourists.   But it did give us a lot of confidence to carry on with the project.

Northern Spain 1995

We took our own car to Santander to drive north to explore Burgos, Vitoria and the Pyrenees.   Again we had to use expensive Parador’s which seemed a waste, because we only slept in them.    The Pyrenees proved much more difficult than expected.  For me at least it proved impossible to work with historical and modern maps.   In particular we spent a very frustrating day trying to follow the progress of the battle of Roncevallies.

The Pyrenees 1996

Better prepared we returned to carry on our explorations of the Pyrenees.  This time we drove through France to the border village of Sare.   We had a great holiday and spent many happy hours walking through the Pyrenees.  But on the way back we had a traffic accident with a coach, which could have ended in disaster.  It happened on the last day as we drove to the ferry.  Within an hour of leaving our Gite we had written off the car, but fortunately we were both ok.  

Austerlitz 1998

We booked a coach tour with Midas Tours for this holiday.   A more budget holiday than Holts Tours, but a much more like minded set of fellow travellers.  Unfortunately we had terrible weather.   We had personal experience of how difficult it is to move through the sticky mud of Austerlitz.   We felt very guilty arriving at our hotel in Brunn each evening covered in mud and dripping all over the carpets

Germany 1999

We booked again with Midas Tours for this tour of eastern Germany.   Fantastic list of battlefields from Jena to Bautzen to Leipzig.  Unfortunately the lack of knowledge and preparation by the tour guide was very obvious, and reduced our enjoyment of the holiday.   We had to wait hours at Prague airport whilst he drove to Berlin to collect two tourists.   Then we were left to our own devices half way through the tour whilst he did a recce of Bautzen.   Despite this it was interesting to see the battlefields, but it would be the last time we relied on someone else to prepare a visit.   It guess it is true that you get what you pay for.

Italy 2000

This one was inspired by a book called Castiglione 1796 written by Bernhard Voykowitsch.   We met him at a book exhibition in London where he was selling them.   He told us that it was the first of a series he had planned to cover all of Bonaparte/Napoleon’s campaigns. He had funded the whole thing himself, and was hoping that he could make enough profit to continue with the series. I never heard of any further publications.   It’s a shame because though a relatively cheap paper back it had excellent illustrations and covered the campaign extremely well.  There was also a short chapter about visiting the battlefields.   We booked a caravan on the edge of Lake Garda and spent a fantastic two weeks exploring the area.

Aspern/Austerlitz 2002

When we were at Austerlitz in 1988 we visited The Posthouse, where Napoleon had his headquarters the night before the battle.  It is now a protected historical building, but has a very modern motel attached.   Because the weather had made the earlier visit such a problem, we were keen to return.  Again we would arrange the whole thing ourselves, and would start with Aspern/Essling.   We flew to Vienna, collected our hire car and drove to a hotel within sight of the church at Aspern.   We had arranged to hire cycles for this first part of the holiday and found them very suitable to explore the large, flat expanse of the Marchland.   A great holiday, and a fitting end to our project.

Walking Napoleonic Battlefields

I started “Walking Waterloo” in May 2009, and finished “Walking Italy” in February 2011.   Each Blog followed the standard layout of one blog for each holiday, and an index of each battlefield visited.   We covered 98 battlefields in those nine blogs, though some were visited and covered twice.

I wanted to make them to be as easy to find as possible, so I decided to do a final blog.   “Walking Napoleonic Battlefields” would be an index to the whole series of blogs.   There would be a short description of each blog, and a link to each one.   I completed this final blog in May 2011.   Two years after I started “Walking Waterloo”.

It is difficult to determine how many visits all of the blogs have had, because there is a counter for each one.  I had never totalled them all before, but I did so for this post.   The overall total visits is 210427.   By far the most visits have been to the summary which has had 77313.

I am really pleased to feel that this project has been read by so many, and I hope that it may have encouraged them to try it themselves.   For any wargamer there can be no greater thrill than walking the actual ground his model soldiers fight over.   And it is a huge learning experience to do so.

But even more than pleasure at the number of visitors is the knowledge that all of the blogs are still visited regularly.

If you would like to find out more you will find a link to “Walking Napoleonic Battlefields” on the right, under My Blog List.