Beneath the preserved craters of Hill 145 runs a chalk corridor dug by hand in 1916, and roughly 250 metres of it are still walkable today. This is the Grange Subway, one of a dozen tunnels driven under the ridge so that Canadian infantry could reach the front line without crossing open ground.
Soft chalk cut quickly with a pick and muffled the sound of digging. It also held its shape without timbering, which is why the walls survive at all.
The wider site covers 100 hectares of ground ceded by France to Canada in perpetuity. Walter Seymour Allward's twin pylons rise 27 metres above the plateau, carved from Seget limestone quarried in what is now Croatia and inscribed with 11,285 names — Canadians who fell in France and have no known grave. Above ground the landscape has been left deliberately unhealed: shell holes, mine craters and the grassed-over zigzag of the Canadian and German front lines, in places less than 25 metres apart. Sheep graze the fenced sections because unexploded ordnance still makes the soil unsafe for machinery.
What the vimy ridge tunnel tours add is scale of a different kind. Standing in the subway, the war compresses to shoulder width. Guides — student interpreters from Canadian universities, posted here each season since 1936 — point out carved regimental badges, maple leaves and initials scratched into the chalk by men waiting for the 5:30 a.m. barrage of 9 April 1917. Ammunition chambers, a dressing station alcove and the mouths of mine shafts open off the main gallery. The temperature holds near 8°C year-round.
The memorial's significance is not only Canadian. Vimy was the first occasion on which all four divisions of the Canadian Corps fought together, and the position had defeated earlier French and British assaults at heavy cost. That is why a Vimy Ridge memorial guided tour tends to run long: visitors linger. The visitor centre, rebuilt and reopened in 2017 for the battle's centenary, sets the tunnels in context with trench maps, personal effects and a scale model of the ridge.
Entry to the site, the museum and the tunnel tours is free — 0 EUR — and the ground is open 09:00–17:00 every day of the week. Tunnel visits are guided only and operate on availability, which is the single constraint worth planning around. Booked transport packages, including the tunnels de Vimy visite guidée offered from Arras and Paris, bundle the underground walk with the surrounding battlefields; vimy ridge tunnel tours tickets for those transfers are held through the operators listed on this page.
4 hr
