Walter Seymour Allward rejected dozens of quarries before settling on Seget limestone from a disused Roman site near Split, then had six thousand tonnes of it shipped to a chalk ridge in the Pas-de-Calais. Eleven years passed between the first block and the unveiling.
That patience explains why Vimy Ridge Tours From Canada still orbit a sculpture rather than a trench line. The Dominion wanted a monument rather than a cemetery, and Allward delivered one that photographs poorly from the road and well from the grass.
The battle was short. Four Canadian divisions attacked together for the first time on 9 April 1917, and Hill 145, the ridge's high point, fell within three days. France granted the surrounding hundred hectares to Canada in perpetuity in 1922, and Allward's twin pylons — one carrying the maple leaf, one the fleur-de-lys — were unveiled in 1936 above the Douai plain.
Twenty allegorical figures inhabit that stone. Canada Bereft, a cloaked mourner cut from a single thirty-tonne block, faces east over the coalfields toward Lens. The base carries 11,285 names, each one a Canadian killed in France with no known grave. Beyond the mown lawn the ground stops behaving like a park: craters overlap, the grass is fenced and grazed by sheep because unexploded ordnance stays in the chalk, and the Grange subway runs beneath the surface. Many Vimy Ridge Tours From Canada tours extend that ground southward, where the Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial preserves a comparable landscape and Somme battlefield day trips fill the afternoon.
Significance here is administrative as well as emotional. Veterans Affairs Canada runs the site, Canadian students in their twenties do the guiding, and a guided Vimy Memorial tour of the preserved tunnels is arranged by the visitor centre rather than by any operator. The memorial, park and visitor centre at Route départementale 55, Chemin des Canadiens, 62580 Givenchy-en-Gohelle carry an entrance fee of 0 EUR. Gates open at 09:00 from Tuesday to Sunday and at 11:00 on Monday. Vimy Ridge Tours From Canada tickets therefore cover coaches, interpretation and the pickup from Arras, never admission, and the Mémorial canadien de Vimy has never charged anyone to stand on the ridge itself.
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