Walter Seymour Allward dreamed the design of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial before he drew it, and then spent eleven years hunting for stone pale enough to build it.
He found it in a disused Roman quarry near Split, in present-day Croatia: Seget limestone, six thousand tonnes of it, hauled across Europe to a chalk ridge in the Pas-de-Calais. King Edward VIII unveiled the finished monument on 26 July 1936 before a crowd of more than fifty thousand, many of them veterans who had climbed the same slope nineteen years earlier. France granted the hundred hectares around it to Canada in perpetuity, which is why vimy ridge tours from arras cross, in twenty minutes of flat farm road, into what is legally Canadian ground.
What remains is less a battlefield than a preserved wound. The ground still ripples with shell craters, softened now under turf and grazed by sheep because the subsoil holds unexploded ordnance and mowers cannot safely enter. Grove after grove of Canadian pine and maple was planted across the churned earth in the 1920s, one tree for each of the fallen. Below, the Grange Subway threads 800 metres of tunnel cut into soft chalk by tunnelling companies preparing the April 1917 assault; visitors still read initials and regimental crests carved into the walls by men waiting for zero hour.
Allward's architecture rewards slow looking. Twin pylons rise thirty metres above the base, one bearing the maple leaf of Canada and the other the fleur-de-lys of France, joined at the foot by twenty allegorical figures — Sacrifice, Truth, Knowledge, Peace, and the veiled mourner known as Canada Bereft, carved in place from a single block. Around the base run 11,285 names: Canadians who fell in France and have no known grave. The visitor centre below the ridge, rebuilt and reopened in 2017 for the battle's centenary, sets out trench maps, tunnelling equipment and personal letters, and it is the assembly point for the free guided tours led by Canadian student guides.
Entry costs nothing. The memorial, the park and the visitor centre are free, open daily 10:00–18:00 at Route départementale 55, Chemin des Canadiens, 62580 Givenchy-en-Gohelle — which makes the practical question one of transport and interpretation rather than admission. That is what a vimy ridge tours from arras tour supplies: a driver, a guide, and the connecting thread between this ridge, the Somme, and the wider Western Front.
4 hr
