HONFLEUR , the best-preserved of the old ports of Normandy and the first you come to on the eastern Calvados coast, is a near-perfect seaside town that lacks only a beach. It used to have one, but with the accumulation of silt from the Seine the sea has steadily withdrawn, leaving the eighteenth-century waterfront houses of boulevard Charles-V stranded and a little surreal. The ancient port, however, still functions - the channel to the beautiful Vieux Bassin is kept open by regular dredging - and though only pleasure craft now use the moorings in the harbour basin, fishing boats tie up alongside the pier nearby, and you can usually buy fish either directly from the boats or from stands on the pier, still by right run by fishermen's wives.

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Honfleur is highly picturesque, and has been moving upmarket at an ever greater rate since the opening of the Pont de Normandie. Despite now being just a few minutes' drive from the giant metropolis of Le Havre, however, the old port still feels not so very different to the fishing village that appealed so greatly to artists in the second half of the nineteenth century

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