Bayeux

We used Bayeux as our main base, which turned out to be exactly the right decision for the first part of the trip. It is a small, handsome town that escaped the destruction of 1944 largely intact — the cathedral is magnificent, the streets are walkable, and it sits at the centre of everything you want to reach on the western side of the region. The Bayeux Tapestry is normally housed here too — an extraordinary piece of medieval embroidery nearly seventy metres long, telling the story of the Norman conquest of England — though it was on loan to the UK during our visit. It is one of the great reasons to come to Bayeux, and worth checking its availability before you go.

The town has good restaurants and a covered market, and it has the particular atmosphere of a place that takes its history seriously without being consumed by it. It felt like somewhere people actually live, which is not always the case in towns that carry this much weight. We moved on to other parts of the region as the week went on, but Bayeux remained the anchor.

The Beaches

Nothing quite prepares you for the D-Day beaches. We had seen the films, read the accounts, looked at the photographs — and still, standing on Omaha Beach on a quiet morning with the tide out and the sand stretching in both directions, the scale of what happened there arrives differently than any of it had on a page or a screen.

We visited several of the landing sites over two days — Omaha, Utah, Gold Beach at Arromanches where the remains of the Mulberry harbour still sit in the water just offshore, the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc where the shell craters are still visible in the grass, the American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer above Omaha Beach where the rows of white crosses seem to go on longer than is possible. Sainte-Mère-Église was another stop we had wanted to make — the church with the paratrooper dummy still caught on the steeple, the town square that felt both ordinary and completely freighted with what it witnessed. La Madeleine at Utah Beach, the monuments at Saint-Laurent. Each site adds something different, and together they form a picture that stays with you long after you have left.

There is a particular quality to the silence at these places. Not the silence of emptiness, but of weight — the kind that settles on you and does not entirely lift, even when you have driven away and the afternoon has moved on to other things. We did not try to shake it. It seemed right to carry it for a while.

What struck us throughout was how deeply and genuinely Normandy honours the sacrifice of the Allied forces who came here. This is not ceremonial or perfunctory — it is woven into the fabric of the region. Streets carry the names of American units and commanders. Towns have dedicated museums with carefully preserved artefacts, personal accounts, and photographs that treat each soldier as an individual rather than a statistic. Normandy has more museums dedicated to the Second World War than almost anywhere else on earth — well over thirty across the region, from the great institutions to the small local collections in village halls — and it is genuinely impossible to see them all in a single trip. Local people, when they learn where you have been, speak about the liberation with a warmth and gratitude that feels entirely undiminished by the decades. You leave with a profound sense that what happened here has not been forgotten, and that the people of Normandy have made a quiet, lasting commitment to make sure it never will be.

Rouen

Rouen is an hour east and worth a full day. The old city is extraordinary — half-timbered buildings leaning over narrow streets, the great Gothic cathedral that Monet painted thirty times in different light, the square where Joan of Arc was burned and where a striking modern church now stands in her memory. It is a city that layers its history visibly, one era on top of another, and walking it feels like reading several books at once.

The cathedral holds one more remarkable secret: the heart of Richard the Lionheart is interred there, a detail that stops you in your tracks when you come across it. A king of England, buried in pieces across France — it is the kind of thing Rouen does quietly, without fanfare, as though extraordinary history is simply part of the furniture.

The streets around the old quarter are lined with cafes and restaurants with generous outdoor seating, and the instinct to sit down and watch the city go by is one worth following. The scenery earns it.

Honfleur and Étretat

Honfleur is the prettiest harbour town in Normandy, possibly in France. The old dock — the Vieux Bassin — is lined with tall, narrow houses in slate and timber, their reflections sitting in the water on calm mornings. It has been painted by everyone who ever came through, and you understand immediately why. We had lunch at a table on the quay and stayed longer than we had planned, which is the correct response to Honfleur.

Étretat is the chalk cliffs — the great natural arches rising from the sea that appear in Monet and in Maupassant and in a hundred travel photographs. In person they are even more dramatic than the images suggest. The walk along the cliff path above the town gives you the full scale of them, and the view back down to the beach and the village is one of the finest in northern France.

Cider, Calvados, and the Cheese

Normandy feeds you well. The region produces some of the finest cheeses in France — Camembert, Livarot, Pont-l'Évêque, Neufchâtel — and we made a point of working through all of them at a dedicated cheese shop where the selection was serious and the advice was freely given. Each one is distinct: the Camembert rich and yielding, the Livarot pungent and complex, the Pont-l'Évêque softer and more delicate. But our favourite was the Neufchâtel — one of the oldest cheeses in Normandy, traditionally shaped into a heart, which makes it as charming to look at as it is to eat. We ate more than was strictly sensible.

We also stopped at a calvados producer for a tour of the distillery and a tasting of several different aged expressions. Seeing the process — the apples, the cider, the copper stills, the barrels laid down for years — gives you a real appreciation for what ends up in the glass. The younger calvados is bright and appley; the older expressions are something else entirely, deep and smooth with a warmth that lingers. We bought a couple of bottles to take home. It is the kind of afternoon that reframes a drink you thought you already understood.

The food throughout the week was rich and serious and very good. Cream appears in most things. Butter is not used sparingly. After a week of it you feel both extremely well-fed and entirely at peace with that fact.