Every design for Évreux

Julius Caesar once wintered eight legions in the country around Évreux, and by late Antiquity a town stood here called Mediolanum Aulercorum. Today the prefecture of the Eure lies in the valley of the Iton, a Normandy river that flows on to join the Eure, while its newer districts reach up onto a chalk plateau scattered with flint.

The feeling Évreux leaves is of a town that rebuilt itself. It was heavily damaged in the Second World War and most of its centre was rebuilt, but the Cathédrale Notre-Dame still anchors it, and the Musée d'Art-Histoire-Archéologie keeps the long memory of the place. The Ebroicians, as locals are called, owe their name to the Eburovices, a Gallic tribe named after the yew tree.

The detail locals point to is water: a branch of the Iton called the Espringale, which once filled the moat of the medieval walls, now flows in the open again on the new place Sepmanville.