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Christophe Jacquet
Published on
June 30, 2024 at 10:05 a.m.
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For its 30 years of opening to the public, the City of Caen (Calvados) offered “a cure of youth ” to the Bird Hill. The large 17-hectare landscaped park to the north of the city has been the subject of four months of work since the end of January 2024.
Visitors will be able to appreciate the changes from the main entrance to the Hill, on Admiral Mountbatten Avenue, this Saturday June 29. A inauguration day is organized there.
Twenty years before making it a public garden in Caen
Among them, few must remember that originally the great jardin public has been built on a former landfilllike the Buttes-Chaumont in Paris for example. The transformation took 20 years to take shape. The Bird Hill as we know it was opened to the public in June 1994, for the 50th D-Day and the International Floralies.
The decision to make it a public garden dates back twenty years earlier, to September 13, 1974. In the municipal council, Franck Duncombe, deputy mayor for the environment, a pioneer in the defense of nature and biodiversity, proposed the reconversion of the waste moundswhich, two years earlier, still reached 25 and 35 meters highon the edge of the Chemin-Vert and Folie-Couvrechef districts.
Who was Frank Duncombe, the creator of Bird Hill?
Bird Hill owes its existence to a visionary elected official in Caen. However, Doctor Frank Duncombe, who died suddenly a year earlier, was unable to experience the opening of the landscaped park to the public in June 1994.
The mayor’s deputy for the environment, Jean-Marie Girault, had the idea in 1972. At that time, he was one of the very few to defend nature. Whether at CREPAN, at the League for the Protection of Birds (LPO) or in the reserves of Brittany and Camargue, oiled or non-oiled birds, such as the northern gannet or the puffin, will have been the cause of his life.
Their exploitation lasted almost half a century. At the end of 1923, the then municipality acquired the site of a former quarry south of the hamlet of La Folie. The household waste of the inhabitants was deposited there, in the open air, before, during and after the Second World War.
The open-air dump, absorbed by the city
In 1964, the City of Caen reported on its website, “the construction of the crushing plant made it possible to separate the metal part from the rest of the waste.” Their quantity is far from decreasing.
With post-war population growth, city limits absorb landfillThe new large complexes in the north of Caen are exposed to bad smellsto the emanations and the decor, at the top of which the birds, seagulls and gulls in particular, circled. Hence the name then given to the landscaped park: the Bird Hill.
It was not until January 1973, and the entry into service of the Colombelles incinerator, that the landfill was decommissioned.
Bird Hill on a ‘phenomenal amount’ of land
This was not covered until the beginning of the 1990s. The earth and rubble embankments from the construction site of the Ornano stadium in Beaulieu and the diversion of the expressway in Mathieu provided the raw material for the base of the Hill. to today’s birds. Or the “phenomenal quantity” of 100,000 m3 of earth moved 30 years ago.
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