Low tide on Gold Beach

If you step out onto the beach at Asnelle in the fog and in the trough of the low tide, you get to see the unusual and irregular shapes of remnants of Mulberry Harbour B that won’t be visible again for 12 hours, and then only if there is light, and, if you happen to be on the beach.

Lesser known than Arromanches-Les-Bains, the beach commonly associated with the Mulberry Harbour, Asnelle was the eastern edge of the facility imagined by Lord Mountbatten, given the go-ahead by Churchill, enabled by civil engineer Major Allan Beckett and build by some 45 000 people across the UK in the first few months of 1944

Walk the two kilometres to Arromanaches-Les-Bains at this time of day and you will see wrecks of the Phoenix Cassions high on the beach, camouflaged by rocks and undergrowth. When you get to Arromanches and venture as far as the tide allows, you will see remnants that suggest almost unbelievable complexities of engineering.

A civil engineering project of huge size and complexity, these floating harbours (Mulberry Harbour A was at Omaha Beach) provided port facilities during the invasion of Normandy in June 1944 and was the key supply route until the deep-water port of Cherbourg was captured on 29 June and returned to full service some months later.

Mulberry Harbour B forms part of the three-day D-Day Beaches guided walking tour.