There is something very different about cycling across a battlefield. You don’t just pass through it. You feel the ground rise beneath you, see the fields and villages that shaped the fighting, and slowly begin to understand why certain hills mattered so much.
This summer, Tiff and I set off on a 3.5-day cycling adventure through Calvados and the Orne Valley with a particular mission: to put our Battle of Normandy SplashMaps to the ultimate test.
We began where so many stories of Normandy begin — on the D-Day beaches — but our map encouraged us to keep going inland. Following the Hill 112 trail, featured on our 6 Armies in Normandy, Battle for Normandy via Hill 112 and D-Day 80th Anniversary Normandy Advance Towel, we rode towards the decisive heights of Hill 112 and onwards to Hill 262.
Along the way, the map kept revealing another story. A memorial here. A museum there. A seemingly insignificant track leading towards ground where thousands of men once fought. We heard extraordinary stories from award-winning battlefield guides and museum teams, many of whom also stock SplashMaps.
We had created a GPX of our route (FREE for you below), using Organic Maps to help locate trailheads and navigate between objectives. But it was the SplashMap that allowed us to understand the adventure. With the whole campaign spread out in front of us, we could see where we were, where we had come from and what lay beyond the next objective. Plans could change without losing sight of the bigger picture.
For the dedicated Memorial Adventurer, that’s the magic. The map unlocks the whole campaign — drawing you away from the beaches and inland towards the hard-won heights and the moving dedications to those who gave their lives for our freedoms.
And when the journey is over, the map doesn’t get thrown away. It becomes the lasting memento of the adventure.
Come and see the maps that took us there at the We Have Ways Festival, 11–13 September. Their success in museum retail — with most of our Normandy lines now sold out for the season — and their use by battlefield guides are proof that these are maps made to be used, explored and remembered.
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