Земли Ко: Нормандский плато и побережье Альбатра

Area in Normandy

The Pays de Caux ('/p//eɪ// //d//ə// //k//oʊ/, pei də ko, literally Land of Caux) is an area in Normandy occupying the greater part of the French département of Seine Maritime in Normandy. It is a chalk plateau to the north of the Seine Estuary and extending to the cliffs on the English Channel coast; its coastline is known as the Côte d'Albâtre. In the east, it borders on the Pays de Bray where the strata below the chalk show through. Cauchois is a notable dialect of the Norman language. The Pays de Caux is one of the remaining strongholds of the Norman language outside the Cotentin (or Cherbourg) peninsula. The principal communities are Le Havre, Dieppe, Fécamp, Yvetot, and Étretat.

In the Norman language caux means lime, calcium carbonate. In French, for comparison, the word is chaux (the French 'ch' being pronounced as an English 'sh'. Example: Caux dialect candelle, English candle, French chandelle ). The name of the neighbouring Pays de Bray comes from an Old French word of Gaulish origin for mud. They appear to be so named as their soils distinguish them; the one of sticky clay, the other on dry chalk, but that is only a legend. In fact, according to something common in the former Gaul, the name derives from the Celtic tribe that lived here in ancient time: the Caletes (or Caleti. It means "the hard or the courageous people", Breton kaled hard, Welsh caled hard ) and this land was their territory. They are sometimes considered as Belgae or as Armoricans. The word Caletes shifted to *Caltes, then *Calz, Cauz, to be spelled "Caux" in modern time.

The Pays de Caux is a plateau of Upper Cretaceous chalk, like that which forms the North and South Downs in southern England. Its surface is an undulating plateau but the seaward side has been eroded by the waves so that the coast is formed of high white cliffs. The small valleys that inland form the undulations, are truncated here, leaving what are known locally as valleuses, steep sided notches in the face of the cliff. They are more or less deeply cut, and some form the sites of small towns such as Étretat. The formations left in the eroded cliff there have long attracted artists. See the photograph where Étretat lies to the right, in the valleuse beyond the first ridge. The main towns in the north, Fécamp and Étretat, are on the coast. Dieppe, is towards the margin of the region, lying as it does on the same geological fault as formed the Pays de Bray. This fault gave rise to the deep harbour which the Northmen found when they arrived. (The Swedish for deep is djup.) The towns on the plateau are generally small. Of these, the larger, such as Yvetot, Bolbec and Lillebonne are towards the south, on the Rouen Le Havre axis. The site of Le Havre was once part of the Pays de Caux but the town has developed into an entity with a separate nature. The population density of the Pays de Caux is a little above the French average. Its traditional industries are fisheries, on the coast, and flax growing and weaving, on the plateau. Once hostilities between the Normans and the French had been settled with Paris, the estuarine ports to the south developed trade up river towards Rouen. In more recent times, urbanization has spread from Le Havre and, more recently still, from the new industrial polder in the Seine Estuary. The plateau's exposure to the winds of the sea may account for one of the features of the rural architecture of the region: the plain, unadorned farmhouses in farmsteads, typically enclosed by high earth banks, walls, and a sheltering square of trees. (see also Architecture of Normandy).

Rescue archaeology undertaken on the line of the A29 autoroute revealed several Gallo Roman villas. One of the most important is that of Sainte Marguerite sur Mer, on the coast to the west of Dieppe. The archaeologists found a complex of several rooms, organised around a square court. Several of the rooms had been furnished with mosaics. To the north, the baths and other rooms were heated by hypocausts. The materials used were pisé (clay and grit well mixed and rammed down to form a wall), cob (a similar mixture of earth of a buttery consistency or marl, chopped straw and perhaps gravel) and timber framing, typical materials of Normandy's later building tradition. Lillebonne is on the site of the main town of the Caletes, the Gaulish tribe of the region. The Gallo Roman town was established with the name Juliobona, under Caesar Augustus and is famous for its Roman theatre. According to a common use in Roman Gaul, the bona (Gaulish word for "foundation, town") was dedicated to the Roman emperor, like Augustodunum (Autun), Augustonemetum (Clermont Ferrand) or Augustodurum (Bayeux), etc. The phonetic evolution from the element Julio to Lille can be explained by the analogy with the French word for island: île, with the article agglutination l = the, that makes sense with the word bona > bonne, which means "good" in French, so "l'île bonne" = the good island. Their original main oppidum could have been Caudebec en Caux or Fécamp, according to the archeological excavations and the numerous Gaulish artefacts, that were discovered in both towns.

In the Merovingian period, the Pays de Caux became distinct from Talou: the ancient city of the Caletes separated into entities or 'countries' in the sense of the Latin pagus. From the creation of the county of Rouen and of the Duchy of Normandy in 911, the Vikings settled a great number of people in the region and left an enduring legacy in the Cauchois dialect but also in the ethnic makeup of the Cauchois Normans.

Guy de Maupassant admirably describes the rural feeling of the Pays de Caux in his novels. For example: drawn from Miss Harriet, published in Le Gaulois of 9 July 1883, under the title Miss Hastings, then, in the compendium Miss Harriet; Maupassant describes a journey by public coach from Etretat to Tancarville:
It was Autumn. From the two sides of the way the stripped fields extended, yellowed by the short stubble of the harvested oats and wheat which covered the ground like an ill shaven beard. The misty land seemed to be smoking. The skylarks were singing in the air, other birds piped in the bushes. The sun finally rose before us, all red on the edge of the horizon; and as it climbed, lighter from minute to minute, the countryside seemed to be waking, to smile, shake itself and throw off, like a girl rising from her bed, its shift of white vapour. The Comte d'Etraille, on the seat, cried; "Look, a hare" pointing to the left towards a patch of clover. The animal darted away, almost hidden in the field, showing only its long ears; then it bolted over some plough land, stopped, set off again in a mad race, changed direction, stopped again, troubled, listening for any danger, undecided which way to go; then started to run again with big bounds of his hindquarters, and he disappeared in a wide square of beet. All the men marvelled, following the creature's progress and gait.

The rugged scenery of the Pays de Caux, within a comparatively short distance from Paris, encouraged artists, including Claude Monet and Gustave Courbet to travel there to paint.