La Manche lies at the western edge of Basse-Normandie, stretching from Cherbourg in the north to Mont-St-Michel in the south. It is often ignored by Brits, who tend to land at Cherbourg and speed through La Manche towards destinations like the Loire Valley and the Dordogne. This is a shame as La Manche is a fascinating and interesting département, rich in culture, history and heritage. 

To the north of La Manche lies the Cotentin Peninsula. Further south is the Bocage area, characterised by its hedgerows and rolling countryside. La Manche's western coast is punctuated by sandy beaches and overlooks the Channel Islands. The southern-western base of La Manche includes Mont-St-Michel, one of the  historical wonders of the western world. Mont-St-Michel has drawn pilgrims since 708, when the Bishop of Avranches, St Aubert, saw a vision of the Archangel Michael. To commemorate this, he built a chapel on the granite Mount. Since then monks and pilgrims have visited, and Mont-St-Michel has been built upon, fortified and fought over.

Today, Mont-St-Michel is still breathtaking. Seeing it rise from its shroud of sun and white evening mist is a truly memorable experience. Travel north from Mont-St-Michel up the coast and you arrive at Granville. Optimistically described as the 'Monaco of the North', Granville embodies the gritty blend of pleasure and bleak seascapes that make La Manche so unique. Granville's most famous son is the couturier Christian Dior. You can still visit his old summer home, the pink clifftop Villa les Rhumbs, which has been turned into a museum. La Manche played an important part in developing Dior's artistic imagination. Throughout his adult life, Dior kept an album in his bedroom which contained photos of the garden he created at Granville. Perhaps inspired by the play of light across the Normandy skies, the first thing the young Christian ever drew was the garden pergola surrounded by a shimmering mirror of water.

Moving north towards the peak of the peninsula you travel through Cotentin and arrive at La Manche's wild northern coast, which seems to strain towards the distant English shoreline. Reflecting this geographic proximity, the Cherbourg peninsula is full of links to les Rosbifs. The ship in which William the Conquerer sailed to England was built in the harbour town of Barfleur. And half a century later tragedy struck Henry I, King of England and Duke of Normandy, when the ship carrying his sons and the cream of the English court sunk outside Barfleur's harbour. The Anglo-french connection continued through the Hundred Years War and beyond. It was at Cherbourg that the allies made their main landing harbour after D-Day. 

Turning south from the Contentin and travelling down the western coast of La Manche, you come to the Parc Naturel des Marais, which preserves some 140,000 hectares of marshland. The Marais is crisscrossed by rivers, ditches, mud flats and oyster beds and is a wonderful place to spot birds like white storks, bitterns and buzzards. Standing under the broad grey and blue skies, surrounded by the shifting planes of water, you get a sense of the Normandy light that has inspired so many artists. "Do as I do: learn to value the sea, the light, the blue sky," the painter Boudin told his young protege Claude Monet. Monet set up his easel on the Normandy beaches to paint heartfelt reflections of light, and the impressionist movement was born.

If you move inland from the coast you come to the central region of La Manche known the as Bocage Normande – a rolling landscape of fields, woods and dense hedges. As the Allies found to their cost, the Bocages formed perfect defensive positions for the retreating Nazis. Today, though, southern and central La Manche is tranquil once more – the département's culinary heartland. This is where you find the famous gnarled orchards which produce Calvados, cider and apple pastries, and the cows which produce the region's 32 cheeses.

Taken together, the qualities of La Manche make it a département worth not departing from. Next time you are tempted to drive through on your way to beaches or the sun, why not pull over and take time to explore La Manche's subtle attractions?

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Article published in June 2007