Mont-Saint-Michel and Saint-Malo from Cherbourg

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

Stand under the lantern tower of Coutances cathedral, the one the town calls 'le Plomb', and look up through the eight open faces of the octagon carried partly in cantilever on four pendentives above a square crossing, on piers fifteen metres round

Work through the Dior collection in the villa Les Rhumbs, the only museum in France carrying the « musée de France » label for a single couturier, and find the winter garden Dior's mother Madeleine had imagined for the house

Climb the steep stair called the Gouffre into the abbey's salle des Gardes, then work round the Merveille on the north side to stand under its eastern gable and the tapering tour des Corbins, and pick out the gilded Saint Michael on the spire 157.10 m above the shore

In the Scriptorial, work through the display of the abbey's library — more than 200 medieval volumes — and find the copies in which the Mont's monks were reading translations of Aristotle, Boethius, Cicero and Plato

Walk the whole 1,754 m circuit of the ramparts, counting the nine gates you pass over, and look inwards as you go: the walls came through the American bombardment of August 1944 almost untouched, and the town inside them was rebuilt afterwards in an old style but not stone for stone, so almost everything below you is younger than the wall you are standing on

At the stalls on the Port de la Houle, buy a dozen flat oysters and a dozen cupped ones and eat them side by side on the slipway: the flat ones are the oysters that won Cancale its town charter from François I in 1545, when the aldermen of Paris had them delivered twice a week, and the biggest wild ones were known as pieds de cheval, horses' hooves

Walk the Promenade du Clair de Lune from the Plage du Prieuré to the landing stage at the Bec de la Vallée, and stop at the cut faces along it to find the banded Saint-Malo migmatites — rock caught halfway between the gneiss it started as and the granite it was melting into

Walk the 2,600 m of rampart walk round the old town and name the nine towers as you pass them — Beaumanoir, Vaucouleurs, Saint-Julien, Beaufort, du Connétable, de Coëtquen, Penthièvre, Longue and Sainte-Catherine — and find all five gates, including the Porte Saint-Louis cut through in 1620

Walk all three enceintes of the château and date the towers by their shape: the earliest are square, the later ones round, and the horseshoe towers were built against the bases of others to give the crossbowmen room to swing. Then look at the stone itself — dressed granite for the corners, local schist rubble for the walls

Take the guided tour of the Cornille-Havard foundry and find the two furnaces they still use: the wood-and-coal double-vaulted reverberatory furnace of 1865 for the big castings and the 1950s one for small bells, with the clay moulds and the casting pit between them. Ask which bell was last poured — this is the workshop that cast the 1.1-tonne peace bell for Bayeux and the bells of Notre-Dame