Dieppe: The Castle, the Fish Market and Le Pollet

Required Activities

• Go up to the Château-Musée, the castle Charles Desmarets began after retaking Dieppe from the English in 1435, and work through the ivory rooms — combs, crucifixes, ship models — carved in this town from tusks its own sailors had been shipping home from the Guinea coast since 1364

• Buy the day's catch at the stalls on the Quai Henri IV and ask which boat it came off — then look at the harbour mouth and work out why Dieppe kept its fishing fleet when other Norman ports lost theirs: it is the only harbour between Saint-Malo and Boulogne that boats can enter at low water

• Stand on the shingle below the town and look up at the cliffs on both sides: the landing went in at 4.45 in the morning of 19 August 1942 and the surviving Canadians surrendered at 8.30, three hours later, having got almost nowhere off this beach. Then cross the harbour to Le Pollet — a peninsula since the extra dock was cut in 1848, and named from the Old Norse pollr, a rounded inlet — and follow the fishermen's streets up the east cliff

• Find the graves of the men from the beach: 8,000 went in on 19 August 1942 and 1,800 did not come back, among them three of the fifteen French commandos of the Kieffer unit who landed alongside the Canadians, the British and fifty American rangers