The landscape around this part of Normandy, France is full of man-made monuments – from standing stones to iron mines.

While out driving recently, Trish spotted something in the distance. It was a brick-built tower sitting in a small valley.

We crossed the field to get a closer look. This involved clambering through a barbed wire fence and hacking through undergrowth. We stood on the top of the ridge looking down into the heavily overgrown valley. In front of us, seen through the trees, was a gigantic megalith.

The brick-built tower was at least 100ft high. There was another, further across the valley. The construction showed that they were clearly Victorian. A bridge, then, but lacking any superstructure.

The structure was just outside the village of Rapilly, in the Calvados département but very close to the border with the Orne. It’s part of an area known optimistically as the Suisse Normande (Swiss Normandy). It’s hilly, full of gorges cut by rivers through the schist and granite.

As we drove towards home, we discovered another viaduct, also brick-built and clearly of a similar age, but arched. It sits, disused, towering over the hamlet of Mesnil-Villement.

Research quickly revealed their history. They supported a branch railway line built between Flers and Falaise and opened in 1874. It was fairly shorted-lived. Traffic stopped on much of the line in 1938. And the final short section was closed in 1969. The viaduct at Rapilly was dynamited.

We paid another visit, from the opposite side of the valley, a couple of weeks later. It’s not easy getting to the viaduct. There are no paths: you have to cross farmland, dodge under a couple of barbed-wire fences and fight your way through a wild wood.

We got to the base of one of the towers, now largely covered in ivy. A tiny stream wends its way past the monument. A field on the river’s flood plain is choked with bramble and nettle. It feels very wild and remote and a strange place to find such a massive structure. It was like something from a sci-fi or fantasy novel – a giant obelisk of inscrutable purpose.

The image on the right shows Trish standing at the base of the tower – she’s the tiny yellow blob. The camera is angled up sharply and the lens set to its shortest focal length, but I still had trouble getting the entire structure in the frame.

This is a site to which we intend to return, at frequent intervals. It has a truly magical and also slightly tragic atmosphere.

It’s difficult to photograph the towers through the foliage, so winter might provide better opportunities to show the structures in the landscape.

I intend to shoot picture tracing the remains of the Flers-Falaise branch line. It has left many relics in the landscape – embankments, cuttings, tunnels (of which more in the next post), station buildings and, of course, bridges.

I’ve already posted a few images in the Branch Line section of the portfolio, and will add more soon. Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with a postcard image of the viaduct from its heyday, when it still had the steel, box-section superstructure that carried the trains.