Cap de Carteret: The Customs Officers' Path, the Hatainville Dunes and Portbail

Required Activities

• Walk the 9.8 km circuit du cap on the customs officers' path, which has watched the Channel Islands traffic since the end of the 18th century: from Carteret beach up to 64 m at the cape and 71 m on the corniche at la Roche-Biard, round to the beach of the Vieille Église, picking out Jersey off the Passage de la Déroute on the way

• Find the ruined church of Saint Germain on the cape, abandoned between 1684 and 1686 as the marly ground under it eroded, then go 110 m down the slope north of it to the start of the dunes for the fontaine Saint-Germain, whose water is said never to dry up; and at low tide find the trou du serpent in the cliff, where the iron-oxide staining on the rock is the blood local legend says the saint drew from a dragon

• Climb into the Hatainville dunes for the length of the sand north of the cape, then take the branch of the customs path down to the batterie du Nez-de-Carteret below the lighthouse and find all four parts of it still standing: the powder magazine, the garrison quarters with their fireplace, the gun platform and the sentry box

• Cross Portbail's bridge of thirteen arches, 80 m long and built in 1873 — on a big tide it sits level with the water and you seem to be walking on the sea — then find the early Christian baptistery beside the church, dug out in 1956: six-sided, the only hexagonal baptistery in France and one of the few found anywhere north of the Loire, with the pool where baptism was by full immersion

• At the lighthouse, find the foghorn standing on the car park — it used to sound automatically whenever the light signal between the tower and the jetty was lost — and look at the square tower itself: allied bombing flattened the semaphore and the radar station here fifteen days before D-Day, and the lighthouse was rebuilt to its own 1837 plans and relit on 25 February 1946