Normandy

Claude Monet lived at Giverny, a village on the Seine at the eastern edge of Normandy, for more than forty years, and his pink house with its green shutters and the gardens he made around it have been restored to the way he laid them out. In front of the house, the Clos Normand is a walled flower garden of dense beds planted for colour; across the road, through an underpass, the water garden holds the lily pond, the weeping willows and the green Japanese bridge he painted again and again. House and gardens open from spring to autumn and close in winter, and the nearest station is Vernon, a few kilometres away across the river, on the line from Paris Saint-Lazare.

Rouen spreads along a loop of the Seine, and its old town on the right bank is built largely in half-timber: streets of leaning, timber-framed houses run between three great Gothic churches — the cathedral, the flamboyant Saint-Maclou and the abbey church of Saint-Ouen. The cathedral's west front, a screen of carved stone and pinnacles, is the one Monet painted some thirty times at different hours and in changing light. From the cathedral, the Rue du Gros-Horloge passes beneath the Gros-Horloge, a Renaissance arch carrying a gilded astronomical clock, to the Place du Vieux-Marché, where Joan of Arc died in 1431; the square is now marked by the church of Sainte-Jeanne-d'Arc, built in the 1970s under a sweeping roof and lit by Renaissance stained glass saved from an older church.

North of the Seine's mouth, the Alabaster Coast runs for about 130 kilometres of white chalk cliffs from Le Havre to Le Tréport, broken by narrow valleys where the towns meet the sea. At Étretat the cliffs take their most dramatic shapes: the Porte d'Aval, an arch with the needle of the Aiguille standing offshore beside it, closes the shingle beach to the west, the Porte d'Amont closes it to the east, and the larger arch of the Manneporte lies beyond the first. Monet and Courbet both painted them, and cliff-top paths on either side of the town look down on the arches. Further along the coast to the north-east, Fécamp keeps a fishing harbour and the great abbey church of the Trinité, and Dieppe, a ferry port on the crossing to Newhaven, has a long pebble beach beneath its cliff-top château.

Across the Pont de Normandie from Le Havre, on the south bank of the Seine estuary, Honfleur gathers around the Vieux Bassin, its old harbour, where tall, narrow houses faced with slate line the quays and stand reflected in the water. A few streets back, the church of Sainte-Catherine is built of timber, its bell tower standing apart across the square, and the lanes around it are full of galleries. Eugène Boudin, the painter of beaches and skies who first set the young Monet to painting out of doors, was born here, and the town museum that carries his name hangs his work. Honfleur is small and fills up on summer weekends; it is at its best early in the morning or out of season.

West of Honfleur, the Côte Fleurie runs as a line of seaside resorts, and two of them, Trouville and Deauville, face each other across the mouth of the River Touques. Trouville is the older and still a fishing port, with a fish market on its quay and 19th-century villas above a wide sandy beach. Deauville, laid out across the river in the 1860s as the seaside of fashionable Paris, has Les Planches, the boardwalk along its beach behind rows of coloured parasols, a racecourse, and the American Film Festival each September.

Inland from the Côte Fleurie, the Pays d'Auge is a country of rolling pasture and apple orchards, half-timbered farms and manor houses, and the stud farms where thoroughbreds are bred. Three of the region's cheeses come from here and are named after their places — Camembert after a village in the south of the Pays d'Auge, the washed-rind Livarot and Pont-l'Évêque after their towns. The orchards give cider, pommeau, an aperitif of apple juice blended with apple brandy, and Calvados, the apple brandy distilled across Normandy, which has an appellation of its own here, Calvados Pays d'Auge. The Route du Cidre, a signposted loop of about 40 kilometres around Cambremer, links farms that pour and sell their own cider and Calvados, and passes through Beuvron-en-Auge, a village of timber-framed houses around a market square. The table follows the land: Norman cooking is built on butter, cream and apples, with oysters, mussels, scallops and sole from the coast.

Bayeux, a small cathedral town about ten kilometres inland from the coast at Arromanches, came through 1944 almost undamaged, so its old streets of stone and timber-framed houses along the little River Aure stand intact around the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Romanesque in its crypt and western towers and Gothic above. It is the home of the Bayeux Tapestry, the embroidered band of linen about seventy metres long, made in the 11th century, that tells the story of William of Normandy's conquest of England in 1066 scene by scene. On the ring road around the centre stand the Musée Mémorial de la Bataille de Normandie, a museum of the summer of 1944, and, across the road from it, the Commonwealth war cemetery. Trains reach Caen in about 20 minutes.

On 6 June 1944 Allied troops came ashore along about eighty kilometres of this coast, on five beaches known ever since by their code names — from west to east Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword — and today the shore is a line of seaside villages, museums, preserved fortifications and war cemeteries. The eastern end begins at Ouistreham, where the ferries from Portsmouth berth, about fifteen kilometres north of Caen, whose Mémorial makes a natural start to the coast. Just inland, Pegasus Bridge crosses the Caen canal at Bénouville, with a museum beside it. Behind Sword and Juno, the Canadian war cemetery lies a little inland at Bény-sur-Mer. At Arromanches, on Gold, the concrete caissons of the Mulberry harbour, the prefabricated port towed across the Channel and assembled off the beach, still stand in the bay, and the cliff above the town looks down on them.

West of Arromanches the coast reaches Omaha, a long beach beneath steep, grassy bluffs. On top of them, the Normandy American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer sets its white marble crosses and Stars of David in rows on lawns above the sea, with a visitor centre and a path down to the sand. The German war cemetery at La Cambe, its dark stone crosses standing in groups of five, lies a short drive inland. At Pointe du Hoc, a headland between Omaha and Utah, the ground is still broken by craters around the ruined bunkers on the cliff edge, left as they were found. Utah, the westernmost beach, lies across the estuary of the Vire on the edge of the Cotentin, with a museum on the dunes at Sainte-Marie-du-Mont.

At the far south-western corner of Normandy, Mont-Saint-Michel rises from the sands of its bay, a granite island whose abbey crowns the rock above ramparts and a single climbing village street. Cars stay on the mainland: shuttles run from the visitor area across the bridge to the foot of the ramparts, and the walk, about two and a half kilometres, keeps the mount in view the whole way. Inside the gate, the Grande Rue climbs between old houses, shops and restaurants to the abbey, where the visit leads from the church at the summit through the cloister and the Gothic halls of the Merveille, built against the north face of the rock. The bay's great tides sweep in across the flats, and at low tide guided walks cross the sands around the mount. The village is quietest early in the morning and in the evening, after the day visitors have gone; the mount and its bay are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.