Many internet sites agree that in France there are approximately 45,000 châteaux, a category that can include castles, manor houses, large estates, and smaller fortified residences. The French government has a formal, legal classification of Monuments Historiques that includes some of these châteaux plus, perhaps, another 40,000 historically significant churches, abbeys, prehistoric sites, Roman ruins, bridges, and fortifications, for example. Narrowing that down further, there are about 100 of these properties across the country that are managed by the Ministry of Culture’s Centre des Monuments Nationaux, and thanks to friends and blog readers J & D, we discovered a pass that gives us entrance to most of these, some of which are accessible by train.

If you saw last week’s blog post you’ll know that we spent about a week on the northwest coast of France in the Pas-de-Calais departement in the city of Boulogne-sur-Mer. The object was to have some time to visit a part of the country that previously we’d only glimpsed from a railway carriage on our way from London to Paris, initially from a ferry port or years later after passing through the Channel Tunnel on the Eurostar. Once we’ve arrived in a city by train, our favorite method of transport is on foot, so we chose some destinations that were easily walkable from the station.

We knew of Boulogne-sur-Mer because on trips from the US to England years ago, it’s where we would arrive by ferry whenever we could “sneak” across the channel to get a taste of France. Once the Channel Tunnel opened, however, taking a train directly from London to Paris in a little over 2 hours, and maybe back that same evening, just made more sense. In those days, whether by ferry and train or later just by train, our destination was always the capital, so that coastal part of the country, known as Pas-de-Calais, remained unexplored by us. Now that we live here, there was time to go back to see what we had been missing in the port city and in the surrounding area.