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This 17th-century relais de poste has an excellent restaurant and brasserie, a fine wood-panelled salon, and bedrooms that blend old with new.

This comfortable family-run hotel in the heart of this active market town offers a choice between two excellent traditional restaurants.

This classically proportioned town house is an efficiently run bed-and-breakfast. Rooms vary in size, but are all decorated in quite good taste with, for the most part, larger-than-average bathrooms. Guests can use the smart, light, drawing room and the garden. There is off-street parking.

This 17th-century coaching inn in the centre of Vernon started life as a manor house of the count of Evreux. Its excellent restaurant, Le Relais Normand, has a romantic courtyard where you can dine in summer. The pleasant rooms have a pleasingly rustic feel.

Half-board offers the best value at this small hotel-bar-restaurant opposite a popular cattle market (Monday is market day). The food is the main draw here – good regional fare prepared by the charming, voluble chef, and attentively served – but there are also seven bedrooms. Downstairs, the modern French decoration includes the obligatory television; this is very much a place for locals.

In most hotels, children under 12 can sleep in a bed in their parents’ room at little or no extra cost.

Painted in Le Havre in 1872. Displayed in the Musée Marmottan, Paris.

Prévert (1900–77) visited Normandy in 1930 and fell in love with it. Soon after, he started to write poetry on the themes of beauty, innocence, love and despair. Paroles , his best-known collection, was published in 1945. In 1971, he and his wife bought a house in Omonville-la-Petite. They are buried nearby, and there is a memorial garden in St-Germain-des-Vaux.

These tranquil public gardens in the heart of the city house a large and important botanical collection, with formal flowerbeds, rare trees, hothouses, orangery, rose garden, rockery, and a collection of medicinal plants.