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Twin towns

St Pol sur Ternoise

St Pol is in northern France, in the rolling wooded countryside of Flanders. It is north of Amiens, between Montreuil and Arras and just over an hour from the channel ports of Calais and Boulogne. Sharing some similarities with Hebden Bridge, it too is the centre of a community of small villages and hamlets in the surrounding area.

Farming is the principal commercial activity in the region, although tourism also features so there are hotels and camp sites and, of course, restaurants.

The town has an historic past and whilst it was heavily bombed in 1944 (and subsequently rebuilt) there are still a few well preserved public buildings worth seeing. There are British cemeteries in St Pol and it is from here that the Unknown Soldier began the journey to his resting place in Westminster Abbey in 1919.

Activities such as cycling, mountain biking, archery, angling, and clay pigeon shooting are all available locally. There are places of interest in the area, there is a motor racing circuit and the coast is not far away. The battlefields of Azincourt (Agincourt), and, from the First World War, the Somme, are in easy reach. There are good train links to Paris from nearby Arras.

St Pol and Warstein became twin towns in 1965 and celebrated their 35th anniversary in the year 2000. The link with Hebden Bridge came later and the official charter was signed in St Pol in 1979 and in Hebden Bridge the following year.

Web site

Saint Pol sur Ternoise|
A bi-lingual site about St Pol, with virtual tours using Flash animations.

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