This is in Northern France, in the rolling wooded countryside of Flanders.
- It is North of Amiens, between Montreuil and Arras;
- just over an hour from the channel ports of Calais and Boulogne.
It is similar to Hebden Bridge. It too is the centre of a community of small villages and hamlets in the surrounding area.
- Find out about the Hebden Bridge Twinning Society (HBTS).
Farming is the main commerce in the region. Although, tourism also features, so there are hotels and camp sites and (of course) restaurants.
The town has an historic past.
- It was heavily bombed in 1944 and has been rebuilt. There are still a few well preserved public buildings worth seeing.
- There are British cemeteries. 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:
- A motor racing circuit.
- The coast is not far away.
- The battlefields of Azincourt (Agincourt) and the Somme (First World War) are in easy reach.
There are good train links to Paris from nearby Arras.
St Pol and Warstein became twin towns in 1965 and the link with Hebden Bridge came later. The official charter was signed in St Pol in 1979 and in Hebden Bridge the year after.
Website
- Saint Pol sur Ternoise. French language site about St Pol.
Hebden Bridge Twinning Society (HBTS)
This started out as the Hebden Bridge European Group.
- First twinned was with the town St Pol-sur-Ternoise in France (1980).
- Later twinned with Warstein in Germany, who were twinned with St Pol (1996).
- A recent friendship with the town of Paratico on Lake Iseo, Italy is also being developed.
For more about this, please visit: HBTS (Facebook).