Curated Itinerary
Funerary and Memory Sites of the First World War: the Western Front Route
The Western Front north to south in thirteen memory sites: the Ypres salient, Vimy Ridge, the Somme memorials, Verdun’s ossuary and forts, and the mountain front in the Vosges.
Take this route into Google Maps
From Tyne Cot – Virtual Tour 360°
to Hartmannswillerkopf,
in the order we curated them.
Google Maps takes 11 points in one route: this one uses 11 of the 13 stops, spaced along the way. The full list is below.
It opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.
This itinerary follows the UNESCO listing “Funerary and memory sites of the First World War (Western Front)”, inscribed in 2023 across Belgium and France. Thirteen stops trace the old front line north to south: the Ypres salient, Vimy and Artois, the Somme, Verdun, and the mountain battlefield of the Hartmannswillerkopf in the Vosges.
The sequence is geographic, but it is also a progression in how nations mourn: Commonwealth headstones at Tyne Cot, German oak shade at Langemark, France’s necropolis at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, the ossuary at Douaumont where the dead of both armies lie together. The listing honours a funerary culture — the equal, individual, permanent grave — that these landscapes invented.
Plan four day-long clusters (Ypres, Vimy/Arras, Somme, Verdun) plus the Vosges coda, with a car for everything south of Flanders. Time your Ypres evening for the Last Post at the Menin Gate; it has sounded there since the 1920s.
Read the full story of this route in the CHO Magazine →
Get this route — explore at your own pace
The walk and the notes are open to everyone, right here. To take the route with you — the GPX and KML tracks for your phone — you need a CHO account, and a free one is enough. We do not sell these routes: we build them ourselves and give them to the people who read us.
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This route was built with the tools we give operators.
Guides, associations and cultural operators build their own routes here: pick the stops from the archive, add your notes, and the map, the GPX and the printable version come out on their own. Your programme gets a permanent page, your events go on the city pages people read while planning — and if you sell your route as a road-book or a virtual tour, you receive 80% of the price net of tax.
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A word from your host
This is a route to take slowly and mostly in silence. Read one soldier's name at each wall, not ten thousand. The Last Post at the Menin Gate, any evening at eight, is the moment the whole listing exists to protect.
Getting around
Ypres works on foot and by bicycle; everything south needs a car. Base yourself in Ypres, Arras, Albert and Verdun, one day each. Cemeteries are free and always open; forts and visitor centres charge admission and close in winter.
Step by step
Tyne Cot – Virtual Tour 360°
The world's largest Commonwealth war cemetery, holding the dead of the First World War's Ypres Salient.
Menin Gate – Virtual Tour 360°
A solemn war memorial at Ypres's eastern gate, honouring British and Commonwealth soldiers lost in World War I.
Langemark German war cemetery
German military cemetery near Langemark holding 44,000+ soldiers killed in World War I, including the schoolboys of the First Battle of Ypres. Dedicated 1932.
Essex Farm Cemetery – Virtual Tour 360°
A World War I cemetery near Ypres honoring 1,204 Commonwealth soldiers, designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield and part of the John McCrae Memorial Site.
Canadian National Vimy Memorial
A solemn Canadian war memorial on the Vimy Ridge battlefield, unveiled in 1936 and re-dedicated in 2007, honouring soldiers killed in the First World War.
Notre Dame de Lorette – Virtual Tour 360°
The world's largest French military cemetery crowns a 165-metre ridge at Ablain-Saint-Nazaire, dominating the Douai plain with a basilica and UNESCO…
Thiepval Memorial – Virtual Tour 360°
Sir Edwin Lutyens's monumental cenotaph honours 72,337 British and South African servicemen lost in the Somme with no known grave, deemed the greatest…
Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial – Virtual Tour 360°
A 74-acre preserved battlefield where the Newfoundland Regiment was nearly destroyed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme (1 July 1916).
Delville Wood South African National Memorial – Virtual Tour 360°
A World War I memorial in Delville Wood, France, commemorating South African forces who fought in the Battle of the Somme.
Douaumont Ossuary – Virtual Tour 360°
A solemn First World War memorial housing the remains of soldiers killed during the Battle of Verdun, built on the initiative of Bishop Charles Ginisty…
Fort Douaumont – Virtual Tour 360°
The largest fortress in Verdun's defensive ring, Fort Douaumont fell to German forces in a single day in 1916, triggering a nine-month World War I battle…
Fort Vaux
A modernised polygonal fortress where Major Raynal's 150-man garrison endured the First World War's fiercest underground siege, communicating by pigeon…
Hartmannswillerkopf
A rocky Vosges peak that became a pivotal World War I battleground, now marked by a national monument to those who died in its trenches.
Download for tour navigation
🔒 The walk and the notes are open to everyone on this page. The files to take with you — the stop list as a PDF, and the GPX and KML tracks for your phone — come with a CHO account, and the free one includes them.
Walk it with the navigator on
It opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.