Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban, marshal of France and the man who fortified its coasts for Louis XIV, left a chain of towers and forts that a cruising boat keeps bumping into. Twelve groups of his works are inscribed together as a single UNESCO World Heritage site, spread along the western, northern and eastern frontiers of France. A good number sit on rocks, islets and harbour walls that you can reach by dinghy while the yacht swings to anchor or sits on a visitor berth. That is the angle I want, because Vauban built these things to be seen and challenged from the sea, and a tender lets you meet them on their own ground.
He died in 1707, and the towers have stood through three centuries of weather and war. Here are the ones I have actually got ashore at, or close enough to, with a dinghy and a bit of patience.
Tatihou and Saint-Vaast: the easiest landing
The pair of watchtowers guarding the Bay of Saint-Vaast are the simplest introduction. Built in 1694, they face each other across the anchorage, the taller two-storey tower standing on the island of Tatihou and its twin on the mainland point of La Hougue. Both are part of the UNESCO listing, truncated cones ringed by bastioned defences, chapels, barracks and powder magazines.
Tatihou is the gem because it is a proper island. Anchor or take a berth in the marina, drop the tender, and you can land on the island to walk the fort, the maritime garden and the museum. Mind the tide: the channel between island and shore dries, and the local foot-ferry only runs across certain states of the water, which tells you everything about how careful you need to be in the tender. If you are arriving by yacht, the Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue lock arrival is gated around high water, so plan the harbour first and the fort second.
Camaret and its gilded tower
Round on the Crozon peninsula, the Tour Vauban at Camaret-sur-Mer, the locals call it the Tour Doree, the gilded tower, stands at the end of the Sillon spit where it guards the approaches to the Brest narrows. It is a polygonal tower 18 metres high, built between 1693 and 1695 to Vauban's own design, and it earned its keep in 1694 when its guns helped beat off an Anglo-Dutch landing attempt.
This one is a doddle to reach. Camaret is a working harbour with a visitor pontoon, and the tower sits right at the harbour mouth. You barely need the dinghy: you can walk to it from the marina along the Sillon. But row out and look back at it from the water, the way an attacking ship would have, and the siting makes instant sense. Camaret is also a natural staging post if you are timing the Finistere tidal gates, so it pairs neatly with planning the Chenal du Four and Raz de Sein passage.
Saint-Malo and the offlying forts
Saint-Malo is Vauban's masterpiece of urban fortification, the ramparts that ring the walled city being the headline, but the more entertaining targets for a dinghy are the forts that stand offshore. The Fort National, perched on a tidal rock just outside the walls, was built to Vauban's design in 1689. It is cut off by every high tide and reachable on foot only at low water, which makes the dinghy the obvious tool if you want to circle it from the seaward side.
Getting in to Saint-Malo itself is its own exercise around the lock and the strong Rance tides, all covered in the Saint-Malo and Rance marina guide. Once you are settled in the Bas-Sablons or behind the lock, the offshore forts make a fine afternoon's pottering by tender at the right state of the tide. The privateer history of the place runs deep, and the Saint-Malo privateer history is worth reading before you go ashore among the ramparts.
Sea forts to admire and not land on
Some Vauban-era works are admired from the boat and no closer. The most famous is not strictly Vauban's own but stands in his shadow: Fort Boyard, out in the Pertuis d'Antioche between Ile d'Aix and Oleron. Vauban himself advised the king against building there, with the line that it would be easier to seize the moon with your teeth, and he was nearly right. Work began under Napoleon in 1801 and the fort was not finished until 1857. It is stadium-shaped, 68 metres long, 31 metres wide, with walls 20 metres high.
You cannot land at Fort Boyard, and you would not want to try in the tide that runs past it. Sail by, take your photographs, and move on. The Ile d'Aix itself, properly fortified in Vauban's tradition, is the place to land your dinghy instead, a quiet island with an anchorage off it in settled weather.
What made Vauban's coastal works different
It helps to know what you are looking at. Before Vauban, a coastal fort was usually a high stone wall, good against ladders and bad against cannon. His genius was the bastioned trace: low, angled, earth-backed ramparts that absorbed shot and left no blind ground for attackers to hide in. The sea towers like Camaret and Tatihou marry that thinking to a simple round or polygonal keep, sited so their guns cover the channel a ship must use. Stand in a tender off any of them and trace the line of fire, and you can see how little water a hostile vessel had in which to manoeuvre unscathed.
That is why these forts repay a visit from the water rather than the land. The car-borne tourist sees a pretty tower on a rock. The sailor sees the firing solution, the chosen narrows, the reason this particular lump of granite was worth a fortune in cut stone. Vauban surveyed most of these sites himself, on foot and from small boats, and you are retracing his eye.
Working a fort into a day's sail
The pattern that works for me is to treat one fort as the focus and let the rest fall where they may. A typical day:
- Arrive on the morning tide and secure the yacht, marina or anchorage, before the fort.
- Wait for the right state of tide to land. Most of these sites are tidal and the dinghy run is only sensible for a window each side of high or low water.
- Carry a handheld VHF, a kedge or a long painter, and shoes you can wade in. Granite slipways are slick and the tide comes back faster than you think.
- Keep an eye on the yacht. An offlying fort usually means an exposed anchorage, and I would not leave a boat unattended at anchor here in anything but flat calm.
One more practical note on the UNESCO status. The listing covers twelve sites in all, not every Vauban work in France, and not all of them are coastal. The ones a cruiser can reach are a small but choice subset, the sea forts and harbour towers. Do not expect a ticket office and a gift shop at every rock. Several are simply there, weathered and unstaffed, waiting for you to row across and put a hand on the granite.
Three centuries on, these towers still do exactly what Vauban intended: they dominate the approaches, they make you read the tide and the rock, and they reward the sailor who comes at them from the water. A dinghy is the right size of boat to understand them. Pick one, time the tide, and go and stand where the guns once pointed out to sea.
