The Grand Site des Deux Caps: Cap Blanc-Nez and Cap Gris-Nez

Required Activities

• Walk the clifftop at Cap Blanc-Nez out to the edge and name five things from one spot in clear weather: the white cliffs of Dover opposite, a Calais ferry crossing between them, the shipping lane working up the strait, Cap Gris-Nez and the bay of Wissant away to the west, and the Boulonnais hills behind you to the south-east

• Climb to the obelisk on the summit of Cap Blanc-Nez, raised between 1920 and 1922 to the Dover Patrol and to the French and British sailors together who held the strait through the First World War, and from its foot find the bunkers of the next war a few steps away and the bomb craters still dented into the turf around them

• Stand on Cap Gris-Nez, the closest point of France to England, and compare the rock under your boots with the cliff you were on earlier: grey clay and sandstone about 160 million years old here, white chalk only 90 million years old at Blanc-Nez, which is why one cape is the colour of Dover and the other is not

• On the south-west flank of Blanc-Nez find the paved letters laid into the ground spelling « Gloire à Marie Médiatrice », each one about seven metres tall and the two lines running some sixty metres, made to be read from the air — then look inland at the Fond Pignon basin, thirty hectares behind a dyke 35 m high holding the 5.3 million cubic metres of blue chalk slurry the French team dug out of the Channel Tunnel

• Walk the clifftop turf slowly and find the sea kale growing in it — the wild ancestor of every cabbage, sprout and cauliflower you have ever eaten — then rub the oregano and thyme underfoot, on the only stretch of chalk grassland that meets the sea anywhere on this coast