A clifftop church that inspired Claude Monet and other impressionists is in danger of crashing into the sea within decades because climate change is speeding the erosion of Normandy’s chalk coastline.
The 11th-century Eglise Saint Valéry at Varengeville-sur-Mer, an historic monument just south of Dieppe, has become a symbol of the destruction facing hundreds of buildings along 90 miles of coastline between the port of Le Havre and Le Tréport to the north. The stretch includes Étretat, whose hollowed out cliff structures were also immortalised by painters.
Like parts of the English coast across the Channel, the land has been retreating as the waves pound the cliffs made of chalk, clay and sand but the increase in storms and heavy rain wrought by climate change has accelerated the erosion. The Normandy coast is crumbling back by an average of 20 centimetres a year.
When Monet painted his series of the Saint Valéry church in the 1880s and 1890s, the building stood well back from the cliff’s edge but even then the parish priest was wondering how long it would survive.
“At the time, the church was about 400 metres from the edge of the cliff but it has retreated back,” Jean-Pierre Rousseau, president of the Friends of the Church association, said. “It’s not linear but some parts of the church are only 40 metres from the cliff’s edge,” he told France Info television.
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In the late 19th century, the spot was also celebrated by Renoir, Pissarro and Corot and in the 20th century by Georges Braque, the cubist, who lived there and was buried in the church cemetery in 1963.
Experts had been predicting that the land would fall away under the church in the second half of the century but they have been revising their forecasts. “We first heard talk of 50 years then 30 years,” Alison Dufour, a retired teacher and guide at the church, told L’Obs magazine. Patrick Boulier, mayor of Varengeville, said: “The landslides used to happen between October and November but now they occur even in July and August”. In 2015, some 5,000 cubic metres of rock crashed on to the shore near Varengeville, killing a man fishing from the pebble beach.
More than €1 million has been spent shoring up the church, which has suffered from movement of the ground beneath. While some locals say it should be left to its fate, there are plans to dismantle the church and rebuild it some distance away. There is also a scheme to place it on a platform and roll it to a position about 200 metres inland.
Engineers say that moving the church is possible, but there are doubts about whether the clay and chalk below can stand the weight of the machinery. A feasibility study will cost €600,000 and moving the building would come to about €12 million.