Étretat is a village on the chalk coast of Normandy, its cove closed at both ends by cliffs the sea has broken through. It cut three arches and left a needle of rock seventy metres high standing alone in the water. Claude Monet came back through the 1880s to paint them in every light, and the country has been looking at them ever since. The walk that everyone does starts on the south side, where a meadow path climbs the Falaise d'Aval. The higher you go, the cleaner the Porte d'Aval arch and the needle stand against the green water. The fences up there are set well back, because the chalk lip is undercut and not as solid as it looks. Late in the day the low sun rakes across the wall and the whole face turns pink-gold above the surf.
The other view is from underneath. At low water a passage opens off the cove's pebbles and runs under the Porte d'Aval into halls of rock that throw your voice back at you. From down there the needle offshore towers over you — the same seventy metres, an entirely different scale. On the north side a short steep pull reaches the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, above the third arch, the Porte d'Amont. From out among the chalk needles beyond it the town is a row of roofs between grey pebbles and green clifftop meadow, with the arch closing the far end of the bay. From January the fulmars come back to the ledges, kittiwakes and herring gulls after them, and the walls stay loud until the young fledge in August. Maurice Leblanc lived in the town, and in his 1909 novel the thief Arsène Lupin works out that the needle is hollow and has held the treasure of the kings of France for centuries. On 8 May 1927 two French war heroes flew out over this cove in a biplane called the White Bird, trying to reach New York from Paris without stopping. These cliffs were the last French ground to see them.