Two short walks in the hills above Giverny

Both walks start from the Village Hall and offer a lovely panorama.

These walks are highly recommended to make your visit of Giverny complete if you can spare around one hour free before you leave. . No visitor comes back without being delighted with the lanscape, the very lanscape that Claude Monet liked so much - a guarantee of its beauty...

From the car parks, turn left into Claude Monet St when leaving the car park (the museums are on your right) and turn right into the first street. Walk up about 80 / 100 m.

The walks are on good grass-covered and fairly level paths. One involves some gentle climbing, the other a steeper (but short) passage.

You will find a map farther down the page.

Starting path

Once you are in front of the Village Hall (see the sign "Mairie"), the path starts across the street (i.e. on your left when you arrive): on the left of the path you see a playground for children and on the right a green sign with "Musée de Mécanique Naturelle" (Museum of Natural Mechanics!). After a short climb, the path follows the back gardens of Giverny houses. Farther on, the path seems to end when merging with an asphalt road from the left, very close to a house.

Two options are possible from there:

 

Option 1/

Turn immediately right uphill (this is the only steep part that may prove somewhat hard to climb ) and 100 /150 m farther turn right again at the T-crossing (impossible to be mistaken) and you come back on a very nice path parallel to the first one but higher up the hill, with a beautiful panorama over the valley. Walk straight on until the path arrives at a country road. Turn right and walk down this road (very little traffic) and you are soon back at the Village Hall, from where you started.

Total time : 50 minutes or less , with plenty of time to look around.

 

A grass-covered path for a very nice walk...

Option 2/

Walk 20 m down this road to find the path on the right again. Continue, still along the back gardens and, after walking past a last house, the path starts climbing up (a 10 minutes' gentle walk uphill). You begin to notice white and red stripes painted on some trees. These are the marks of a long distance Ramblers' Association. Go straight on, following these marks.
Very soon after the top of the hill, the path arrives in open fields. Turn left immediately (still following the white and red marks) into the wood and walk about 5 minutes until you arrive at a wooden cross, from which you have a great view over the Seine valley.
Walk back the way you came, tuning right when you are out the wood, and down the hill.

Tourists interested in botany find here the remants of former sheep pastures with a number of remarkable plants betraying an important sub-mediterranean influence [one can see, for instance Astragale de Montpellier (Astragalus monspessulanus) and other plants such as Bugrane naine (Ononis pusilla), Orobanche de la Germandrée (Orobanche teucrii) or Hélianthème blanchâtre (Helianthenum oelandicum ssp incanum) ].

Astragalus monspessulanus (left) and Vicia lutea (right), two of the typical flowers of the hills of Giverny
Photos : C. Hennequin

Please refer to the page of the Conservatoire des Sites Naturels de Haute Normandie (Preservation trust of natural sites in Haute Normandie) for more détails about the vegetation of these karstic expanses or calcareous brushwood or meadows through which the walk passes.
http://www.cren-haute-normandie.com/site/coteaux_giverny.htm (Website in French only)

 

Other pages about Claude Monet's garden and Giverny :

Welcome to Giverny : a practical page for the visit of the garden
The making of Monet's garden
List of plants and flowers
Calendar of flowering times
Giverny: an American colony : the history of the artists who came to giverny in Monet's time