Bayeux: The Cathedral, the Battle of Normandy and the Tapestry's Return

Required Activities

• Find the Tapestry's own building, the 17th-century hôtel de Nesmond, and the cathedral treasury it hung in for centuries, then pick out Bayeux itself on the embroidery: scene 22 shows the walled town, and you can still trace the line of the Roman castrum through the streets

• Go into Bayeux cathedral, consecrated in 1077 under Bishop Odo, then walk the four corners of the Roman enclosure it sits in — 450 m by 350 m, the cathedral in the south-east corner and the vanished castle where the place de Gaulle is now — and find the surviving stretches of Roman wall behind the houses in the rue Bourbesneur and the rue Saint-Malo

• Visit the Musée Mémorial de la Bataille de Normandie in Bayeux, on the campaign of summer 1944

• Walk the Bayeux war cemetery, the largest British Second World War cemetery in France, and count how many nations you find among its 4,648 graves — the 466 German ones are in the same ground as the British, with Poles, Russians, Czechs and one unidentified man beside them — then read the memorial opposite with the names of 2,808 missing

• Walk the route de Gaulle took on foot through Bayeux on 14 June 1944, his first day back on French soil, out to the place that now carries his name, where he came back on 16 June 1946 to give the speech that set out what became the constitution of 1958; then watch the lacemakers working at the Conservatoire de la Dentelle, in a town that has been making lace since the 17th century