Arromanches

You see the caissons from the clifftop before you understand what they are. Driving west from Bayeux toward the coast, the land slopes down and the Channel appears and there, sitting in the grey water of Gold Beach, are perhaps twenty large grey shapes — concrete structures the size of apartment blocks, partially submerged, some tilted, trailing foam. It takes a moment to calibrate what you are looking at: the surviving remains of Mulberry Harbour B, the prefabricated artificial harbour the Allied forces towed across the Channel in pieces and assembled in the bay at Arromanches between June 6 and June 18, 1944. A harbour with the capacity of Dover, built in twelve days, to supply the armies that had just landed and would need to keep receiving men, food, ammunition, and vehicles for months to come.

I walked down to the beach in early October with the tide out, which is when you can get close enough to understand the engineering. Each caisson — they are called “Phoenix” units — is a hollow concrete box approximately sixty metres long and eighteen metres high, built in Britain during the preceding months and towed across in secret. Lined up end to end they form the outer sea wall of the harbour, with further structures inside creating a sheltered anchorage. On the beach itself, in the sand that people were walking their dogs across around me, the iron of the floating roadways that once extended from ship to shore is still visible as rusted outlines in the tidal flats. You are walking on a piece of industrial history that was also, for a brief period in 1944, one of the most important pieces of infrastructure on earth.

The village of Arromanches sits above the beach on a slight rise, and it has organised itself around its particular historical distinction with a competence that stops well short of exploitation. The Musée du Débarquement on the seafront is one of the better small D-Day museums — not trying to compete with the scale of the Mémorial de Caen, but doing something the larger museums cannot: it orients you directly to the beach and bay you can see through its windows, explaining what was assembled out there and what the logistics of that assembly meant in practice. There is a scale model of the complete harbour as it was in July 1944, when it was fully operational and offloading nine thousand tonnes of supplies per day, that makes the engineering ambition legible in a way the ruined caissons alone cannot.

The Arromanches 360° circular cinema, built into the cliff above the village, shows an eleven-minute film combining archival footage from 1944 with contemporary footage of the same locations. It sounds like a tourist attraction and functions as something more than that — the juxtaposition of the same cliff edges, the same beach, the same grey water, carrying different contents separated by eighty years, does something that straight documentary cannot. I am not someone who typically sits through audio-visual museum experiences. I watched it twice.

The village has a handful of restaurants and a hotel that has been there since before the war and looks it — in the good sense, the sense of things that have absorbed time and kept their composure. The café terraces face the beach and the caissons, and there is something particular about sitting outside with a coffee in the October cold, looking out at those concrete shapes in the bay, and thinking about what was assembled there at speed under enormous pressure by people who did not know if it would work. It worked. Parts of it are still there.

When to go: Low tide is essential for the best experience of the beach and the remains — check the tide tables before you visit. The spring and autumn equinoxial tides bring the most dramatic exposures. The D-Day anniversary period in June brings crowds and a particular atmosphere of commemoration. October and November are quiet and the light on the concrete caissons is superb.