The ground at Vimy has never been cleared. Roughly a hundred hectares of the ridge remain closed to the public because unexploded ordnance still lies under the turf, and the grass is kept short by grazing sheep rather than machinery.
What visitors walk instead is a network of preserved trenches, sandbag revetments cast in concrete, and mine craters that have softened into shallow green bowls.
France ceded the site to Canada in perpetuity in 1922, a gift of land rather than a lease, which is why the Canadian National Vimy Memorial is administered from Ottawa and why entry to the memorial, park, and visitor centre costs 0 EUR. That transfer explains the character of vimy ridge tour packages sold across the region: guides working here are frequently Canadian student interpreters, and the interpretive frame is national as much as military. The four divisions of the Canadian Corps fought together for the first time on 9 April 1917, taking the ridge in three days after two years of French and British attempts had failed.
Walter Seymour Allward's monument is the reason most people come. Completed in 1936 after eleven years of work, it rises from Hill 145 in Seget limestone quarried in what is now Croatia — six thousand tonnes of it, chosen because Allward dreamed of the material before he found it. Twenty allegorical figures occupy the structure. The mourning woman known as Canada Bereft faces east over the Douai plain, carved from a single thirty-tonne block. On the walls below, 11,285 names are inscribed: Canadian dead in France with no known grave.
The Souterrain Grange tunnel system runs beneath the visitor approach, part of the chalk subways British and Canadian engineers cut to move troops unseen to the start line. Sections are open on guided walks, their walls still carrying carved regimental badges and initials.
North and south, the Somme battlefields extend the same landscape of chalk, cemetery, and crater, which is why the strongest Vimy Ridge memorial guided tour itineraries pair the two. The Canadian National Vimy Memorial sits within a wider commemorative geography — Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, Neuville-Saint-Vaast, the Ring of Remembrance — recognised in 2026 as part of France's UNESCO-listed funerary and memorial sites of the First World War. Well-chosen vimy ridge tour packages tours read that geography as one continuous document rather than a list of stops, and the better vimy ridge tour packages treat the ridge as its centre. The address is plain enough: Route départementale 55, Chemin des Canadiens, 62580 Givenchy-en-Gohelle.
4 hr
