France gave the land outright. In 1922 the French state ceded roughly 100 hectares of the Douai plain to Canada in perpetuity, so a Vimy Ridge Day Trip ends on ground that is, in law, Canadian.
Four divisions of the Canadian Corps fought together for the first time here on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917, and took Hill 145 in four days at a cost of 3,598 dead.
What remains is not a reconstruction. Shell craters have slumped into green hollows and the chalk spoil has grown over, but the contour of the ground is the contour of 1917. Sheep graze the closed sectors because unexploded ordnance makes mechanical mowing unwise. Near the visitor centre a short stretch of trench, cast in concrete sandbags in the 1930s, holds opposing lines within grenade range of one another. Beneath it runs the Grange Subway, a tunnel cut through soft chalk for men and mules; Canadian student guides lead the descent in season, and most Vimy Ridge Day Trip tours are built around that half-hour underground.
Walter Seymour Allward spent eleven years on the memorial above. Unveiled on 26 July 1936 before King Edward VIII and some 6,000 Canadian pilgrims, it uses Seget limestone quarried in Croatia, chosen for a whiteness that holds against the flat northern sky. Twin pylons rise about thirty metres from the base, one carrying the maple leaf and one the fleur-de-lis. Twenty allegorical figures stand around them — Sacrifice, Truth, Knowledge, the Breaking of the Sword — and on the eastern wall the veiled figure known as Canada Bereft looks down toward the plain. Around the base are carved 11,285 names: Canadians killed in France whose graves were never found.
Significance now is quieter than commemoration. The battle is taught in Canada as a founding episode; on the ridge itself the argument is left to the visitor. Admission to the memorial and grounds is 0 EUR — free entry for all visitors — and the gates keep 10:00–18:00 hours from Tuesday to Sunday, with a 12:00 start on Mondays. Vimy Ridge Day Trip tickets therefore price transport and guiding rather than entry: private transfers from Arras, half-day guided excursions, and longer Canadian battlefield itineraries that pair the ridge with Somme cemeteries or the New Zealand ground in Artois. The site stands at Route départementale 55, Chemin des Canadiens, 62580 Givenchy-en-Gohelle.
4 hr
