Omaha Beach
— the silence the tide brings back twice a day.
Not only on a wall.
“Omaha Beach runs about eight kilometres along the Normandy coast, between Vierville-sur-Mer and Sainte-Honorine-des-Pertes. At low tide the sand reaches nearly half a kilometre out, the same crossing the 1st and 29th Infantry made on the morning of 6 June 1944. The cliffs at Colleville hold the American cemetery; the wind off the Channel carries the smell of cold sea and cut hay from the bocage above. from the studio
Omaha 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.
Omaha Beach is the Allied code name for one of five landing sectors on the Normandy coast, struck by the United States 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions on 6 June 1944. The beach itself runs roughly eight kilometres between the villages of Vierville-sur-Mer and Sainte-Honorine-des-Pertes, in Calvados department. Above it sits the Normandy American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, where 9,388 American war dead rest under white marble crosses and Stars of David on a 70-hectare bluff overlooking the Channel.
The cemetery at Colleville holds the noise of the place. Visitors speak softly between the rows; the bell tower marks each hour and the wind carries the rest. Below the bluff the beach itself is a working stretch of Norman sand: local families walk dogs at low tide, sand yachts run the flats, and the line where the landing craft grounded is invisible. The silence is not absence. It is what the tide brings back twice a day, and what the Channel never lets you forget.
The American Cemetery and its visitor centre at Colleville-sur-Mer open daily except 25 December and 1 January, with no admission fee. Pointe du Hoc, where the 2nd Ranger Battalion scaled a 30-metre cliff under fire, sits seven kilometres west. The town of Bayeux, twelve kilometres inland, serves as the standard base for visits to all five Normandy beaches and kept its medieval centre intact through the war.