The Manneporte from the clifftop path

Beyond the Porte d'Aval, over the shoulder of the Falaise d'Aval, the coast path drops into the next bay and the Manneporte appears: a single enormous arch, the largest of the three at Étretat, with a leg of chalk standing in open sea. Monet painted it again and again; most day visitors never get there, because it needs another twenty minutes of walking past the point where the crowds turn back.

That walk is the whole value. Within ten minutes of leaving the golf-course clifftop you are on open grass with the sea below and nobody in the frame, and the arch itself is big enough to hold a wide composition on its own. Shoot from the path above for the arch in its bay, from the descent for a lower, more monumental angle, and back toward Étretat for a layered chalk-headland view the town never gives you.

Light favours the afternoon and evening: the arch faces roughly west-north-west, so the sun comes round onto it late and, in summer, sets over the sea beyond. Morning leaves it flat and shadowed. Clear days after a northerly give the sharpest air; sea fog is common in spring and can erase the arch completely.

Practical: this is a clifftop walk on grass, mud and chalk, not a promenade — proper shoes, and it is exposed to the full wind with no shelter anywhere on it. Stay well back from the edge: the cliff is undercut and unstable, and sections of the path have been rerouted after falls. Allow a good hour there and back from the town, plus shooting time, and carry water in summer.