Gold Beach
— — the long flat shore the tide gives back every morning.
Not only on a wall.
“A wide, shallow beach on the Calvados coast, eight miles of pale sand running between Arromanches and Ver-sur-Mer. At low tide the iron caissons of the Mulberry harbour still rise out of the bay, rust against grey water, holding the shape of the artificial port the British towed across the Channel in June 1944. The fishing boats come in around them like nothing is unusual. — from the studio
Gold Beach, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Gold Beach is the central of the five Allied landing beaches of 6 June 1944, on the Calvados coast of Normandy. The sector ran roughly eight miles from Port-en-Bessin in the west to La Rivière in the east, taking in the small resorts of Asnelles and Arromanches-les-Bains. It was the British 50th (Northumbrian) Infantry Division that came ashore here, joined by 47 Royal Marine Commando. By nightfall on D-Day the division had pushed almost to Bayeux, the deepest single-day advance of any of the five beaches.
What survives at Arromanches is the Mulberry B harbour — a prefabricated port towed across the Channel in sections and sunk into position in the days after the landings. At its peak in late June 1944 it was landing roughly 9,000 tons of supply a day. The Phoenix concrete caissons that formed its outer breakwater still rise out of the bay at low tide, broken into roughly the same arc they held in 1944. The Musée du Débarquement on the seafront keeps the scale model and the original engineering drawings.
Gold Beach is reached from Bayeux, about six miles inland, by the D516 to Arromanches. Most visitors begin at the Musée du Débarquement on the seafront, then walk west along the cliff path to the British Normandy Memorial above Ver-sur-Mer, which lists the 22,442 names of those who died under British command in the summer of 1944. The beach itself is open at all hours and free; the tide pulls back nearly half a mile at low water, and the caissons are most visible in the two hours either side of it.