The beautiful port town of Fecamp is a popular holiday spot and for concrete tourists there's a lot to see including over a dozen gun casemates spread across the hillsides, a stack of casemates on the cliff edge, and a huge radar facility.
Fecamp was split into around a dozen different strongpoints with bunkers built to protect the town, on the edge of the hill to cover the port area, and on the cliffs at the top of Cap Fagnet where a mixture of defensive structures and radar bunkers still remain.
After the fortress ports of Le Havre and Dieppe, Fecamp was the third most fortified port in this area of Normandy. Fecamp was occupied between June 9, 1940, and September 2, 1944.
Fe09 stands on the crumbling cliff face directly overlooking the entrance to the port, and its multiple gun bunkers were all designed to resist Allied access to the port area.
There are three casemates on the edge of the cliffs, each at increasing heights stepped up the slope. A R676 casemate for a 4.7cm Skoda fortress gun stands at the lowest level just above the beach. An R630 for a heavy machine gun – with an armoured plate – stands a few metres further up and a R612 casemate for a 7.5cm field gun overlooks them both from the top of the slope.
If you walk along the jetty near to the R676 you can see there are the remains of a tunnel system to the rear of the bunker which linked several of the buildings here.
All three are very close to being undermined by erosion of the soft cliffs and will eventually fall to the beach below.
A small field construction concrete building for a machine gun crew, plus a Tobruk for a tank turret, and a second R612 casemate complete the defensive buildings on the point of the headland.
Now under housing, there was also a Wellblech shelter for troops, a R621 personnel bunker, a R610 company battle headquarters bunker, and a second R630 MG casemate - the later facing inland to give the site protection from land based attack.