Abbeville: The Flamboyant Collegiate Church, the Father of Prehistory and the Bagatelle

Required Activities

• Work out which way the front of Saint-Vulfran faces — not west, as a church front should, but north — then find on the south portal the Assumption group carved in 1501 by Pierre Lheureux and paid for by the mercers' guild, under the twin towers that stand 55.80 m above the pavement; inside, the vault is new, because the German shelling of 20 May 1940 brought it down and the church was only given back to worship in 1998

• Stand under the belfry of 1209, one of the oldest in France and one of the fifty-six belfries of France and Belgium that UNESCO listed together in 2005, then go to the museum's Maison du Chantier in the Carmel-Maison du patrimoine, where the Boucher-de-Perthes collections are explained while the museum itself is rebuilt

• Inside the Bagatelle, count the rooms Abraham van Robais actually built — a winter salon, a summer salon and a dining room, with no bedrooms and no kitchen offices, because it was never meant to be lived in, only to impress clients — and in the round summer salon find the painted panels that have never been restored, with their fountains, perfume burners and ostrich eggs, and overhead the eagle of Washington set in the painted sky for baron de Kalb, who married a van Robais and died of his wounds after Camden

• Walk out of the French garden into the English park behind the Bagatelle and find the box topiary rabbit standing six metres high and the cat beside it, then the two-hundred-year-old ginkgo and the fern-leaved beech, and pace the length of the 54-metre pool on the great lawn