Falaise

Falaise is a town that makes you hold two very different centuries in your head at once, and I didn’t fully expect that when we drove down from Caen on what was meant to be a quick half-day stop. The castle on the hill announces the first story before you’ve even parked the car. The second story you only find once you start asking why so much of the town around that castle looks rebuilt.

The bastard’s birthplace

The Château Guillaume-le-Conquérant sits on a rocky spur above the Ante river gorge, and this, according to tradition, is where William was born around 1028, the illegitimate son of Duke Robert I of Normandy and Herleva, a tanner’s daughter from the town below. Norman chroniclers didn’t let him forget his birth for a moment — “William the Bastard” followed him for years before Hastings turned him into “the Conqueror” — and there’s something satisfying about standing in the reconstructed great hall of the keep where a duke’s son with no legitimate claim was raised anyway, and who went on to take an entire kingdom by force in 1066. The castle you walk through today is largely the work of William’s son Henry I of England and later Norman-Angevin dukes, a formidable stone keep with a smaller adjoining tower, restored carefully enough over the past few decades that you can actually feel its scale rather than just read about it on a plaque. Lia, who usually gets bored in castles after the first tower, stayed a full hour just pacing the ramparts looking down at the gorge.

The pocket that closed in August 1944

What I hadn’t fully absorbed before visiting is that Falaise gave its name to one of the most consequential and brutal engagements of the Battle of Normandy: the Falaise Pocket, in August 1944, when Allied forces encircled and nearly annihilated the retreating German Seventh Army in the fields and lanes around the town. Falaise itself was almost entirely destroyed in the fighting, and much of what looks like an old Norman town center today was in fact rebuilt after 1944, stone by stone, in a style deliberately matched to what stood before. A memorial and small museum near the town, along with markers scattered through the surrounding countryside, trace the closing of the “pocket” and the scale of the losses on both sides — tens of thousands of German troops killed, wounded, or captured in a matter of days. We drove out along part of the encirclement route in the late afternoon, fields that looked entirely peaceful, sun on the hedgerows, and it took real effort to square that quiet with what the same ground had held eighty-something years earlier.

When to go: Late spring or early autumn gives the clearest light for the castle’s stonework and the surrounding gorge views, and avoids both summer crowds at the château and the low grey skies that can make the battlefield sites around town feel even heavier than they already are.