Normandy Holidays and Guided Tours
Normandy sits just across the Channel, and yet it feels a long way from home: apple orchards and dairy pasture inland, chalk cliffs and working harbours on the coast, and a run of towns that gave Impressionism its subject matter. Rouen, Honfleur, Étretat and the village of Giverny are all within an easy morning's drive of one another.
Our Normandy holidays are built around that painters' country, with a driver-guide, a fixed programme of visits and time to look at things properly. The tours below travel by coach and ferry or by rail, and one of them crosses to the Channel Islands off the Norman coast.
Frequently Asked Questions About Our Normandy Tours
The Monet tours on this page run to five days, and the Channel Islands holiday is seven. That gives you four nights in one hotel on the shorter tours, so you unpack once and travel out each day rather than moving from place to place. Exact durations, prices and what is included are listed on each tour page, as those differ between departures.
Both, depending on the tour. Our coach tour to Normandy includes a return ferry crossing and private coach travel throughout, so your luggage stays on board and there is no driving or navigating to do. The Monet rail holiday travels by Eurostar from St Pancras with transport provided throughout once you are in France. The Channel Islands holiday sails from Poole. Each tour page states which applies.
Late May and June are the strongest weeks: the wisteria is over the Japanese bridge, the irises are out in the flower garden, and the first water lilies are opening. September is quieter and still very good, with dahlias and nasturtiums spilling across the central path. The gardens close for the winter and reopen around the end of March, so a Giverny visit is only possible in the open season.
Not at present. The Normandy holidays currently on this page concentrate on Monet, Giverny, Rouen, Honfleur and the Impressionist coast, and the excursions listed on each tour page are what you will visit. If you are booking as a private group — a club, a society or friends travelling together — and want a battlefield emphasis, do talk to us about what could be arranged.
It varies by tour, so check the individual page. Our coach tour to Normandy includes breakfast and all evening meals, which means only lunches are left to you. The Monet rail tour includes four breakfasts. Lunches on a touring day are usually taken wherever the itinerary has got to, and your driver-guide will point you towards somewhere sensible.
Not at all — Open Group departures bring together individual travellers and couples, and solo travellers are a normal part of the mix. A single supplement applies for sole occupancy of a room on our Normandy tours, and the figure is shown on each tour page. If you would rather share, or you want to know how many single rooms are left on a particular departure, ask us.
Giverny and the Impressionist Normandy
Claude Monet first saw Giverny from a train window in 1883, rented the pink house with the green shutters, and bought it seven years later. He stayed until his death in 1926. The flower garden in front of the house is planted in long straight beds, deliberately crowded, and the water garden behind it — the pond, the willows, the green Japanese bridge — was dug by Monet himself and became the subject of the water lily paintings of his last thirty years.
Rouen belongs to the same story. Monet painted the cathedral's west front more than thirty times from a room across the square, watching the stone change colour through the day. The Musée des Beaux-Arts in the city holds a good Impressionist collection, and the great curved Nymphéas panels hang in two oval rooms at the Orangerie in Paris. Our Monet tours draw on several of these places in one itinerary.
Rouen, Honfleur and the Alabaster Coast
Rouen is a city for walking. The half-timbered streets lean over the pavement, the Gros Horloge clock has been telling the hour since the fourteenth century, and Joan of Arc was burned in the Place du Vieux-Marché in 1431 — the modern church there marks the spot. The cathedral's cast-iron spire is the tallest in France.
Honfleur, on the Seine estuary, is built round the Vieux Bassin, where the tall narrow houses are reflected in the water. Sainte-Catherine, up the hill, was put together by local shipwrights and looks it: the roof is like an upturned hull. Eugène Boudin was born here and it was Boudin who first took the young Monet outdoors to paint.
West along the coast, Étretat has the chalk arches and the needle of rock that Monet painted repeatedly. It is one of the most recognisable stretches of coastline in France.
The Channel Islands off the Norman coast
Guernsey and Jersey lie closer to Normandy than to England, and it shows. The place names are Norman French, the old country language of Jersey is Jèrriais, and the islands have been self-governing for centuries.
Our Channel Islands holiday sails from Poole and splits the week between the two, three nights in Guernsey and three in Jersey, with guided touring on each island and a day on Herm. Herm is about a mile and a half long, has no cars, and takes a morning to walk round.
There is more history here than the beaches suggest. Victor Hugo spent fifteen years of exile at Hauteville House in St Peter Port and wrote Les Misérables there. Both islands were occupied between 1940 and 1945, and the German fortifications are still very much part of the coastline.
Bayeux, Mont-Saint-Michel and the landing beaches
Normandy carries a great deal of history for a region of its size. William, Duke of Normandy, sailed from here in 1066, and the embroidered account of it — seventy metres of it — is displayed at Bayeux. Mont-Saint-Michel rises out of the sands on the Breton border. On 6 June 1944 the Allies landed along eighty miles of coast between the Orne and the Cotentin, and Arromanches, Pegasus Bridge and the cemetery above Omaha Beach are visited every year by British travellers.
We should be straight with you: our current Normandy programme is built around Monet, Rouen and the Impressionist coast rather than the 1944 beaches. Clubs, societies and groups of friends booking a private tour often want a different emphasis, so if a battlefield itinerary is what you have in mind, ask us what we can put together.
