You can’t visit Normandy without taking in at least one WW2 historical site. I’ve been to a lot of the famous sites on previous trips to Normandy, and it never ceases to amaze and humble me. However, with only one spare day to dedicate to this on our trip, and considering the landing beaches are almost two hours away from where we are staying, I wanted to choose somewhere I thought my kids would find interesting and entertaining. We settled on the town of Arromanches-les-bains in the Calvados region of Normandy.

Arromanches was in the middle of the Gold beach landing zone, and was the site of the famous Mulberry Harbour – an artificially created harbour allowing the allies to unload up to 9000 tonnes of equipment every day. The British came up with the idea of towing enormous concrete pontoons and landing bridges all the way from England to create the makeshift harbour without waiting for the actual ports of northern France to be retaken after D-Day. The concept worked brilliantly, and during its three months of use, the Arromanches mulberry harbour landed 500,000 vehicles, 2,500,000 troops and about 4 million tonnes of equipment.

Today, many of the massive concrete pontoons remain beached on the sand and are accessible at low tide. It has an eerie feel, like many of these sites in Normandy do. You can’t fail to stand on one of these beaches and feel a huge amount of sorrow and bemusement at the atrocities that once occurred here, and still just about within living memory.

Just around the coastline there is also the German gun placements at Longues-Sur-Mer, the only one in Normandy to still have all its original guns still in place.

There is a small museum on the beach in Arromanches dedicated to the D-Day landings which is well worth a visit for the model dioramas explaining how the mulberry harbours worked. The town is also lined with the usual “militaria” gift shops, for all your repro ww2 essentials if that’s your thing

If you’re visiting in a Motorhome there’s a great Aire de camping-cars up on the cliff by the 360 cinema which allows you to stay for 10e per 24 hours.

After seeing all the sights on offer, we filled up a small glass bottle with sand from the beach to go on our trinket shelf at home, and made our way back home.