Summary of Walking Napoleonic Battlefields

Jan and I have two main interests, Napoleonic history and hill walking. In 1971 we decided to spend our summer holiday visiting the battlefield of Waterloo. I remember it as one of those holidays when the sun is always shining and you enjoy every moment. It was to be the first of many enjoyable holidays spent walking and exploring Napoleonic battlefields.

On 9 April 2009 I started a blog to record those visits, and I started with our visit to Waterloo. I wanted to create a personal diary of our walks, which I hoped would also be of general interest. Particularly for anyone interested in visiting Napoleonic battlefields.

When I started I realised that we had visited quite a few battlefields, but I did not appreciate how many until I started researching for the blog. Over the years I have kept a scrapbook/photograph album of each visit, and they formed the basis of each blog.

I wanted to be able to refer back to each walk, so I have created an index of the walks. Each holiday has its own blog. There are nine Blogs:

Walking Napoleonic Battlefields

Waterloo 1971

Spain and Portugal 1991

Northern Spain 1994

The Pyrenees 1996

Austerlitz 1998

Germany 1999

Italy 2000

Aspern/Austerlitz 2002

You will find a link to each blog on the My Blogs List on the right

There are 90 blog entries in total, each one covering a different walk. Some are return visits to a particularly interesting battlefield. Each blog has a list of Lables, one for each walk.

At a rate of one blog per week it has taken just over two years to complete the exercise.

This blog, Walking Napoleonic Battlefields, is a summary of the other Blogs. It also contains a link to each one.

It is almost ten years since our last battlefield holiday.

We are now living in Spain, and we still walk regularly.

I often think it would be nice to explore the battlefields of eastern Spain, but it would require a lot of research. Then I think it would be nice to visit Russia and Borodino. Or perhaps return to Italy and the battlefields we missed last time. So this may not be The End.

Schlapanitz

On our last day at Austerlitz we only had a few hours before we had to drive to Vienna and the flight back to UK. Just long enough to visit Schlapanitz. Its a short walk from the monument marking Napoleon's command post on Zuran Hill to the small town of Schlapanitz.

Its expanded some since the battle, but the old town is largely unchanged and must have looked much the same in 1805. Unfortunately the museum was closed during our visit, but we spent a pleasant half hour sipping wine at the nearby cafe.