Meeting Vauban for the first time

After two nights at îles de Saint Marcouf, we set sail just after lunch for île de Tatihou, a short distance up the coast. Here we anchored in the lee of the island, with a fine view of fortifications and tower designed by a certain Marquis de Vauban in the 17^th century.

Not a bloke we’d heard of before, but someone who’d become a bit of a theme in our time in France.

Who is this Vauban?

Sebastien Le Preste, the Marquis de Vauban, was a military engineer and a bit of an all-round genius, it would seem. As part of his warfaring and work for the King he made a study of how best to ensure the defence of France’s borders. His focus was identifying what constituted the geographically most defensible boundaries for France. As part of this effort, he identified the key defensive locations and then designed fortification for these that were at the forefront of military technology for the time.

In the late 1600s Louis XIV gave him the task of implementing the plans that resulted from this work. While ultimately not all of his master plan was implemented, today, spread around France’s borders, are a host of impressive forts and fortifications that were either ‘improved’ by Vauban, designed and built by Vauban, or designed by Vauban and subsequently ‘improved’ by others. Towards the end of his life he could identify over 300 fortifications that he’d built before retirement. Where does one get the expertise for this kind of endeavour? Well, apparently when he wasn’t occupied with designing and building the things, he spent a lot of his time attacking the fortifications of others. He claimed to have led 40 sieges over his career. Clearly a busy man.

New part of our French itinerary

His expertise in military architecture was such that many of these fortifications remained in use with only slight modification up until and during WW-II. They are all rather dour edifices, built from local stone, but are somehow rather enchanting. A few of them have gained UNESCO World Heritage Status such as those at île de Tatihou. And of course, they tend to be placed in commanding positions over the surrounding approaches, and make for excellent spots to visit for good local views. So we decided that from then on that Vauban would become one of the organising themes of our itinerary along the French coast.

Visiting the ‘Tour de Tatihou’

We took a wander around the ‘Tour de Tatihou’ perusing the fortifications.

These appear to have been built, at least in part, due to a bit of Dutch inspired trauma as they were built following a fairly decisive defeat of the French navy by the Anglo-Dutch fleet just off Tatihou in 1692.

Interestingly, their latest use was during WW-II when the Germans modified them as part of their Atlantic Wall defences. We had no weapons with us during our visit, but found that the battlements also made for a good vantage point for birdwatching.

Missing Saint Vaast-la-Hougue

All up it was nice enough there on Tatihou that we never actually made it across the couple of hundred metres of water in the opposite direction to the local town, Saint Vaast-la-Hougue. In 2019, this was voted as France’s ‘favourite village’. We did a cruise by of its harbour walls in the dinghy, but at that point the harbour lock was closed as the water level outside the lock was about 6m lower than inside. This had Frederieke feeling a bit confused. For a Dutch person dikes and locks are all about keeping water out but here they are used to keep the boats in the harbour floating when the tide drops by 10m. Without any easy way of accessing town, we instead, cruised back to the boat along the long rows of oyster racks. Sadly, in this oyster mecca for the French, neither of us are particularly fond of the things.