We spent 10 days exploring the coastal region of Normandy in the Northwest corner of France. We enjoyed many sunsets-over-sea (and land), lots of lovely long walks, fresh breezes and gale force winds, and discovered beaucoup de petite agricultural-maritime towns. Autumn was in full swing with golden leaves raining down and covering the footpaths, grey swirly skies and pumpkins everywhere. Turns out the French are getting quite into the spirit of Halloween and many shops are decorated with ghosts and skeletons and one of the little villages we stayed in had a pumpkin festival. They don’t have a holiday in France on the 31st October but they do on the 1st November which is ‘All Saints Day’ – the French and Spanish ‘day of the dead’ when they visit cemeteries and remember those who have passed.
First up, my usual collection of observations on the Normandy region
Fiercely French –Normandy felt more French than its neighbouring Brittany with lots of really significant sites in this region including the Mont-Saint-Michel and its Bay, Etretat and its dramatic cliffs, the D-Day Landing Beaches, Claude Monet’s house and gardens in Giverny, the Bayeux Tapestry, the ritzy seaside town of Deauville to name a few.
Windy seaside towns: with lots of seafood, fishing ports and river mouths defining the flavours and smells of the towns on the coast.
Ferry traffic: The coast of Normandy has departure points for ferries that cross to the Channel Islands and/or England. The many ferry ports and can make access to towns tricky if you are trying to get in and around close to ferry arrival or departure times.
War history: Battlefields and defence systems permeate through the land and especially at every strategic cliff top and massive tidal beach or river mouth.
Soft pastel light – no wonder Normandy is the birthplace of Impressionism – the light is softer, the land lighter, the sunsets pinker. Is it the salt air? The chalky cliffs? The creamy sand? It does feel like you’re wandering through a Monet or Renoir!
Now, here’s a summary of the towns we stopped in or passed through – in alphabetical order.
Beautiful, beachy Blonville-Sur-Mer
This beach town on the coast at Le Bai del la Seine/La Manch (the channel) is rather grand with many timber-turreted-castle style ‘beach shacks’ for Parisians built by the bourgeoise. We stopped here for a gawk at the grand homes (shuttered up now for winter) and a sunset walk along the big sandy beach.
Delightfully decadent Deauville.
We stayed 4km inland from Deauville and walked in via cycle-walking path each day to explore. The path takes you past two massive racecourses – one which is just a long straight and the other with the full circular tracks. Deauville is famous for its horse races and Casino and is very Monte-Carlo style glamourous. Deauville is all manicured lawns, big boulevards and Parisian vibes and the café’s set up like they do in Paris putting their chairs and tables in rows facing the street to allow customers to people watch. We browsed a photographic exhibition outside the Tourismé that told of and showed people practicing their Old -Lost Trades and read about a kaleidoscope maker, a gilder and broom makers to name a few. Then we spotted one of the biggest markets we’d seen yet across the canal in Trouville. We browsed a huge array of clothing, household items and fresh food before walking back into Deauville. Trouville is more fishing port, snack cafes and bars the more casual cousin of the old dame Deauville.
Les Deux Caps walk from Cap Gris Nez to Cap Blanc Nez
We did this amazing walk over two days by starting each day in the sleepy seaside village of Wissant and walking to Cap Gris Nez one day and to Cap Blanc Nez the other. The track is 24 kilometres from cap to Cap and is part of the GR120/E9 walking path. Splitting it over 2 days meant it should have been a 12km walk each day! And it would have been if we didn’t mix up the high tide time on our walk back from Cap Griz Nez and had to take the inland bike route back to Wissant making that days walk 18kms! You need to take the high tide warnings very seriously as there is a 1km stretch of the walk to Cap Griz Nez that is fully on the beach – which at high tide is 8metres underwater with waves crashing on to the dunes. And for the walk from Wissant to Cap Blanc Nez its a 3km stretch on the sand. You shouldn’t be on the beach 2 hours either side of high tide and when we walked in October with a King Tide due to a full moon you couldn’t be on the beach 3 hours either side.
Les Deaux Caps is the third-largest Grand Site of France and the walk towards Cap Gris-Nez, ends in the CROSS, which is the Regional Operational Center for Maritime Surveillance and Rescue, that keeps an eye on one of the busiest straits in the world – the english channel with 500 ships passing through here every day (not counting the ferry crossings!). England is so close you can see the white cliffs of Dover – in fact the English coast is at the closest point here which is why so many choose to do thier channel swim from here as well.
The walk towards Cap Blanc-Nez, can be done entirely on the beach if you go at low tide like we did or you can take the stairs up to the cliffs on the GR120/E9 trail and climb to more than 130 meters, with a breathtaking 360° view of the Bay of Wissant to Dunkirk, from the top.
Étretat and the incredible cliffs
This town and its cliffs are incredible! The little town is snuggled in the nook of the towering chalky cliffs of the Alabaster coast. You can walk in either direction to explore either a clifftop garden or the golf course. We walked on the Falaise d’Aval (Cliff of Aval) towards the golf course – this walk is part of the GR21 Cliff Trail (Grande Randonnée ) which runs for 45 kms from Le Havre to Fécamp. We walked towards the famous needle like structure (the Aiguille) and the Aval arch stopping to watch golfers tee off and chase their balls down. The cliffs, arches and stacks are made from thousands of years of crustaceans that were crushed together when the cliffs were under the sea. It really drives home how far the water has retreated as the cliffs are more than 90 metres high. We walked out to some of the stacks across a teeny bridge and gazed back along the coastline that reminded us a little of the Bunda Cliffs of the Great Australian Bight on the way across the Nullabor in Australia.
A lot of big wonders in little Eu
The grand town of Eu (it has a lot of big buildings for a town with such a small name!). We still can’t figure out how to pronounce the town name properly – is it Eww, Er, Oh or U? We found the market tucked in and around the huge Cathedral, the Chateau and the Mairie. It made me laugh to see mattresses leaning against marble statues, scarfs and tea-towels flying in the wind in front of the Mairie and the potatoe and pyjama sellers backing up the Cathedral steps. There are so many beautiful and grand buildings in this town that was once on an important trade route.
Fougéres fabulous Saturday market
We took a little detour one Saturday morning to pick up some fresh fruit, veggies and chicken at the Saturday Fougéres market – the weather was patchy but the town and market were great and it wound around the many streets. We also walked out to the Belvedere for some lovely views over the agricultural land below.
Pretty poetic Honfleur
The super pretty town of Honfleur is an absolute must to visit. Unfortunately for us, a cruise ship was in port so there were a fair few tourists walking around the cobblestone lanes and the Vieux Basin – Old Harbour – where the fisherman and now yachties pull in. We overheard one woman (I’ll let you guess nationality) say to her husband “But Frank, you promised me there would be candy” …there was plenty of ‘candy’ in fact in Honfleur – we bought some delicious dark chocolate covered orange peel from a very fine chocolatier. Honfleur is famous for the battles fought in this area but also for its authors, impressionist painters, musicians and playwrights. We read about them as we wandered through the Jardins des Personnalites that stretches down to the estuary where the Seine River meets the English Channel.
Glorious grandeur of Le Mont Saint-Michel
What a magical island ‘town’ that from afar looks a little like a cupcake with a fancy ornament on top (the Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey). Stranded out in what is now a mostly mud-filled bay (apparently it fills at king tides) it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and counted as one of France’s most stunning sights. Mont Saint Michel actually started as a major pilgrimage destination and place for burial and worship. From 966 onwards, the dukes of Normandy, followed by the French kings, supported developed the Benedictine abbey on top of Mont-Saint-Michel. This abbey became a renowned centre of learning, attracting some of the greatest minds and there are now many museums you can visit to learn more about this time. We were lucky to enjoy the Mont Saint-Michel to ourselves (almost) when we visited for an overnight stay. We walked the 2km out from the carpark in the late afternoon and squeezed in amongst the throngs of tourists and headed up to the terrace gardens to soak up the sun far from the madding crowds until we could check in to our hotel at 4pm. We ventured out again at 6pm when all the shops had closed, and the tourists had gone and walked back up to the abbey terraces to watch the sunset – which was absolutely stunning on a late September cloudless, windless night. It was around 7.30-8pm when we walked back through town looking for a restaurant for dinner – and was shocked to find they were all either shutting or full! We finally found one – the White Sheep that let us in as their last customers – and we enjoyed a rather expensive lamb stew before they packed the tables up around us. So be warned – if you stay overnight on Mont Saint-Michel book a restaurant ahead and be prepared to eat early. I think it was because all the staff need to catch the last bus off the island to get home? Other things worth doing at Le Mont Saint-Michel are a tour of the Abbey, walk around the upper levels and across the mud flats and just poke around all the little streets.
Magical, mesmerising, Mers-Les-Bains
This was one of our favourite little seaside towns so far. It’s on the Picardy coast of Normandy and has a twin town across the river (not nearly as nice) called Le Tréport. Mers-Les-Bains is so packed with architectural delights, exhibitions, beautiful cliff top walks, cute squares and an amazing pebbled beach with huge tides and lovely sunsets.
Mers-Les-Bains was developed at the end of the 19th century when the aristocracy and the rich bourgeoisie of Paris discovered the therapeutic benefits of sea bathing. One of the original bath houses was in our street and the little wooden beach boxes still lay scattered on the pebbled beach. The aristocracy hired architects from the World Fairs held in Paris in the 1800s to build their villas in a range of decadent styles from periods including Anglo-Norman, Flemish, Picard, Moorish, Renaissance, Louis XIII, Napoleon III. The Ville Protegé, has around 500 Belle Epoque villas with many of the most beautiful ones on Esplanade du Général Leclerc which runs along the seafront for 800m.
There was also an exhibition of paintings by the artist Dan Jacobsen along the promenade – he was commissioned to create a series of watercolours to connect iconic buildings and monuments of Paris to Olympic sports for the 2024 Olympic games. It was a bit of fun as he had pole vaulters leaping over the Arc de Triomphe and tennis players playing on the Champ de Mars etc. There is also a more permanent exhibition along the waterfront of colourful paintings by local graffiti artist Johann Grenier – who has also created a sleeping beauty in an old bunker embedded in the hillside that leads up to the clifftops – we walked past her each morning on our sunrise run/walk up to the statue of Notre-Dame de la Falaise.
One morning, we walked from the top of these cliffs another 6km along a coastal track from Mers-Les-Bains to the little town of Ault. We passed through farmers ploughed fields and through a herd of creamy cows and a bull atop the chalky cliffs. We were amazed to see the farmer whistle and call out “Allez, Allez” and the cows (and Bull) all came to him and followed him into the next field. We clapped and said, ‘very impressive’ and he replied with a grin, “Yes but I cannot do the same thing with my wife and children. They don’t listen to me!” We also walked from Mers-Les-Bains one day around the many shipping locks and bridges to the town across the river mouth of the Seine River to Le Tréport and up to the La Falaise Belvedere for a wonderful view back to Mers-Les-Bains and ventured a little further along the GR route that runs along these clifftops too. We caught a little mini funicular down back down which went through the cliffs.
Super ancient Saint-Valery-sur-Somme.
Saint-Velery-sur-Somme has earned the label of ‘one of the most beautiful detours in France’ and is famous for its strategic position on a limestone promontory facing the Bay of Somme. It was a strategic lookout for pirates and illegal traders crossing the channel between England and France and has had a large fort and ramparts to protect the important trading route since 500 B.C! William the Conqueror and Joan of Arc passed through the medieval city. We climbed up to the medieval city, through the large Porte and along to the remains of the ramparts , the Guillaume towers , and down the small cobbled streets. It was eerily quiet for a Friday and I think everything had shut up for the winter. We then walked into the lower town to look for lunch and found everyone having their long lunches at bistros – but managed to find a lovely boulangerie for a quiche and baguette which we ate as we strolled along the quays that border the Bay of Somme.
St. Malo and its fort walls
We have visited St. Malo before and walked her walls and traced the footsteps of Marie-Laure the brave Parisian teenage in the charming novel “All the light we cannot see” by Anthony Doerr. We love this town but as we were catching a ferry from here out to Guernsey we only had a short time to duck into the cobblestone streets to grab a croissant and remind ourselves of how uniquely charming this city is.
