What to see

Located around 2km north of the town of Valognes, the Wn543 site is one of the most intriguing we’ve visited, but also one of the most mysterious with little information to be found about the bunkers at the historic location.
The German concrete which can still be found here point towards the area being a command post with two huge R608 battalion/regiment HQ bunkers, two R622 double group shelters, two smaller shelters – one possibly a garage, and an extended Kabelschaltstelle (KSS) cable junction bunker.
The bunkers run along a line of an old tree-lined track which leads to the Chateau de Chiffrevast, an early 17th Century castle which stands on the site of a medieval fortress.
Three castles have so far stood on the same site, the first being built in the 11th Century was demolished in 1354 during a feud between local the owner lord Nicolas de Chiffrevast and lord Geoffrey d’Harcourt after one of Chiffrevast’s men was accused of killing a tame deer belonging to Geoffrey.
A second castle was built around 1450, but this fell into disrepair and was razed to in order to rebuild a third castle and the current property was completed in 1618, today standing inside a vast park surrounded by farmland.
During the Second World War, this area was earmarked to be the site of one of Hitler’s largest V-weapon storage and launch facilities.
Wasserwerk Valognes or Tamerville was one of five massive WW2 German V1 flying bomb heavy storage facility and launch sites planned for construction in northern France. There was to be two in the Pas de Calais area – Siracourt and Lottinghen (also known as Wasserwerk Desvres) – and three in Normandy around Cherbourg at Brecourt, Couville, and Tamerville.
They would each consist of one large storage and workshop bunker over 200m long and around 40m wide with supporting buildings including generator bunkers, water supply reservoirs, and launch ramps – with two launch ramps planned for each.
To hide their true identity and function, the sites were codenamed ‘Wasserwerk’, or waterworks.
In early 1943, construction began on two sites in the Pas de Calais region – Wasserwerk St Pol, at Siracourt, and Wasserwerk Desvres, near Lottinghen, which is inland of Boulogne-sur-Mer.
The plan was for them to be operational before the end of December 1943.
More sites were planned for Normandy with two under construction – Wasserwerk Cherbourg at Couville to the south west of the city, and Wasserwerk Valognes near to Tamerville, north east of the town of Valognes.
Four of the sites were still under construction when they became targets for Allied air raids, with the Siracourt site the one closest to becoming operational with only excavation beneath the finished roof due to be completed.
Wasserwerk Cherbourg at Couville didn’t make it past the early stages of excavation and construction of the site due to raids between November 1943 and January 1944 while work was stopped at the Tamerville site near Valognes around the same time to divert resources towards defensive Atlantikwall sites nearer to the coast.
While there isn’t any evidence of the V1 site in the fields around the chateau, the bunkers which can be found at Wn543 would have been in close proximity to the V1 megastructure but may or may not have been linked.
The first structure you encounter as you walk towards the chateau along the track is a well-hidden Kabelschaltstelle (KSS) cable junction bunker for telephone communications.
It’s accessible if you don’t mind crawling through cobwebs and brambles to get to the partially buried entrance where a short corridor doglegs left into a single, square-shaped room buried underground.
Two R622 double group shelters stand either side of the track, the western one is a pile of exploded rubble while the frontage of the eastern R622 looks to be in much better shape, although it isn’t accessible so the inside could be in ruins. We suspect it will be as all the other buildings here show huge structural damage from internal explosions.
The two R608 HQ bunkers are extensive in size, but it’s difficult to work out the layouts of some areas of them due to their damaged state. From the outside they look undamaged, but the insides of both are a real mess of concrete and twisted metal.