Three days in Ypres: the medieval town is a reconstruction, the cemeteries are not

Two nights inside the ramparts, the museum and the Menin Gate on the first day, the northern salient on the second, and Poperinge on the way out.

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Length
3 days, 2 nights
Where you stay
Ypres
Places
8 across 3 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Ypres was a wealthy cloth town with a hall the size of a cathedral, and in four years of shelling between 1914 and 1918 it was reduced to a brick field. Winston Churchill wanted the ruins left as they were. The people who had lived here disagreed, came back, and rebuilt the town as it had been, stone by stone, over forty years. What you walk into looks medieval and is younger than the grandparents of the people serving you coffee.

The ground outside the town is the reason to come. The salient, the bulge in the line that the British and Commonwealth armies held here at enormous cost, is now farmland with one hundred and fifty cemeteries in it, some holding a dozen men and one holding almost twelve thousand. Farmers still turn up shells every spring.

Three days is the right length and the shape is settled: the town and the museum on the first day, the northern battlefields on the second, and the quieter country behind the lines on the third. None of it is a sightseeing trip, and most people find they are quieter at the end of it than they expected to be.

Highlights

  • The Last Post at the Menin Gate, eight in the evening, played by the town's own firemen
  • In Flanders Fields, a museum in the rebuilt cloth hall that tells the war through the people who were in it
  • Tyne Cot, the largest Commonwealth war cemetery in the world, looking down over the ground it was won on
  • Langemark, where the German dead lie under flat stones and oak trees, and 24,917 of them share one grave
  • Talbot House in Poperinge, where half a million soldiers were treated as equals for an afternoon

Where to stay

Ypres, two nights inside the ramparts

Stay in the town rather than in the countryside. Everything on the first day is within ten minutes of the Grote Markt, the Menin Gate is a five minute walk from most hotels, and coming back to a lit square after the ceremony is part of the evening.

The rebuilt centre is small: a market square with the cloth hall on one side, a cathedral behind it, and a rampart walk around the southern edge that is the prettiest thing in the town and the quietest place to sit.

Day by day

Day 1 in Ypres

The cloth hall, the ramparts and the Menin Gate

The first day stays inside the walls, which is the right way round: the museum explains the ground before you stand on it.

Give the museum most of the afternoon, walk the ramparts to the small cemetery on the southern wall in the early evening, and be at the Menin Gate before eight. Eat afterwards; nothing in this town closes early on the strength of a ceremony that half the customers have just come from.

  1. 14:00

    In Flanders Fields Museum

    Culture

    In the rebuilt cloth hall on the market square, and the best single account of the war anywhere on this front. It works through individual people rather than campaigns, using letters, film and objects, and a wristband that gives you a real person to follow through the four years. Allow two hours. The bell tower above it can be climbed for the shape of the salient from above.

  2. 18:00

    Ramparts Cemetery

    Historic

    A small cemetery of 198 Commonwealth graves set into the old town wall beside the Lille Gate, with a pond on one side and trees over it. It is the loveliest place in Ypres and almost nobody comes here, which is the reason to walk the ramparts to it rather than driving out to something larger.

  3. 19:30

    Menin Gate Memorial

    Historic

    A triumphal arch that is really a wall of names: 54,896 British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in this salient before August 1917 and have no known grave. The gate was not large enough for the rest, and the remainder are listed on a wall at Tyne Cot. The Last Post is sounded here at eight every evening.

  4. 20:30

    Dinner on the market square

    Eat

    The square is ringed with brasseries doing stew, chips and the local beers. It is unremarkable and it is exactly what is wanted after the gate.

With more time: If you arrive early enough, the cathedral behind the cloth hall was rebuilt in the same campaign and holds a memorial to the men of the Household Division, and the tourist office on the square sells the battlefield maps that make the second day make sense.

Day 2 in Ypres

Passchendaele, Tyne Cot and Langemark

Today goes north east into the salient, over ground that took three months and a quarter of a million Commonwealth casualties to cross in 1917. The three stops sit within nine kilometres of the town and about four of each other.

Take the museum first for the chronology and the dugout, then the cemetery on the ridge that the whole battle was fought to reach, then the German cemetery to the north west, which is a different kind of place entirely and should not be skipped.

  1. 09:30

    Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917

    Culture

    In a chateau at Zonnebeke, telling the battle in order and then putting you underground: a reconstructed dugout of timber and corrugated iron with sleeping quarters, a dressing station and a headquarters, and outside a full set of trenches, British and German, dug to the original patterns.

  2. 12:00

    Lunch in Zonnebeke or Passendale

    Eat

    There are cafes by the museum and in the villages between the stops. Buy something in the town before you set out if you are cycling; the countryside here is thin on shops.

  3. 13:15

    Tyne Cot Commonwealth Cemetery

    Historic

    The largest Commonwealth cemetery in the world: nearly twelve thousand graves on the slope below Passchendaele ridge, more than two thirds of them unidentified, with a curved wall at the back carrying almost 35,000 further names of men never found. The German blockhouse under the Cross of Sacrifice was left where it stood at the request of King George V.

  4. 15:15

    Langemark German Cemetery

    Historic

    The German cemetery, and the opposite of the Commonwealth ones in every choice made: flat stones set in grass under oaks, dark basalt rather than white Portland, and near the entrance a single mass grave holding 24,917 men. Four bronze figures stand at the back, mourning. Ten minutes here explains more than an hour of reading.

With more time: With an extra hour on the way back, Hill 60 is a small piece of ground south of the town that changed hands repeatedly, was mined from beneath in 1917 and has been left cratered and uneven ever since. The Australian tunnellers' memorial there still carries bullet marks from the next war.

Day 3 in Ypres

Poperinge, behind the lines

Poperinge is eleven kilometres west and was the other Ypres: out of range of most of the shelling, so it became the town where men came back to. Estaminets, baths, concert parties, a hop harvest that carried on through the war, and the army's machinery for punishment in the same square.

It has its own station on the Ieper line, so this works as a last morning whichever way you are travelling. Two buildings, five minutes apart, and they make an unforgettable pair.

  1. 10:00

    Talbot House

    Culture

    An Every Man's Club opened in a merchant's house in 1915 by an army chaplain, where rank was left at the door and half a million soldiers passed through for tea, a piano, a library and a chapel in the loft. It is still furnished as it was, you can play the piano, and the visitors' book of the time is on display. The most human place on this front.

  2. 11:45

    Death Cells and Execution Spot

    Visit

    In the courtyard of the town hall, the cells where condemned men spent their last night and the post they were tied to at dawn. Several were shot here for desertion after breakdowns that would be treated as illness now. It takes ten minutes to see and considerably longer to shake off.

  3. 12:45

    Coffee on the Grote Markt, then the train

    Note

    The square in Poperinge is a working market place with cafes on two sides. Trains back through Ieper to Kortrijk run roughly hourly, so check the time before you sit down.

With more time: If you have a car and the afternoon, Lijssenthoek outside Poperinge was the largest casualty clearing station on this front and its cemetery holds nearly eleven thousand men, almost all of whom died of wounds rather than in action, with a visitor centre that tells one story for each day of the war. The hop museum in the town covers the other trade that this countryside lives on.

Before you go

Getting here, and getting around the salient

Trains reach Ieper from Kortrijk in about half an hour, and Kortrijk connects to Brussels, Ghent and Lille. From Brussels the whole journey is around an hour and three quarters, from Bruges an hour and a half, both with one change. Lille is the closest big city and about an hour away by rail.

The town itself is small and entirely walkable. The battlefields are not: the cemeteries and museums are spread over twenty kilometres of countryside with almost no public transport, and the buses that exist run for schoolchildren rather than visitors.

That leaves three options. A hire car is the most flexible. A half or full day guided tour, of which several run daily from the market square, gives you a driver who knows which field mattered and why. Or take a bike: the terrain is flat, the routes are signed, and the distances (Tyne Cot is nine kilometres out) are well within an ordinary day.

The Last Post

Buglers of the local volunteer fire brigade have sounded the Last Post under the Menin Gate at eight every evening since 1928, with a break only while the town was under German occupation, when it was played in England instead. It resumed on the evening Polish troops liberated Ypres in September 1944, while fighting was still going on around the town.

The road is closed, the crowd stands in silence, and the whole thing takes about ten minutes unless there are wreaths to be laid. Arrive twenty minutes early in summer, longer in the weeks around Remembrance Sunday. There is no ticket and no reserved seating, and standing at the back under the names is as good a place as any.

How to visit the cemeteries

The Commonwealth cemeteries are open at all hours, free, and never locked. Each has a register in a bronze box by the entrance listing everyone buried there and where they lie, so if you have a name to look for, you can find the grave yourself in a couple of minutes. The Commission's website will tell you which cemetery before you leave home.

The convention is simple: nothing is picked, nothing is taken, and the grass is walked on because it is meant to be. Poppies, crosses and photographs left at a headstone are cleared periodically rather than immediately.

When to go

Spring and early autumn are best: the light is long, the fields are worked, and the coach parties are thinner than in July and August. The week around 11 November is the busiest of the year and the most affecting, and every room in the town is booked months ahead.

Museums here mostly close on Monday and shut altogether for a few weeks in January. The cemeteries do not close at all.

The strongest impression here is not any single cemetery. It is the ordinariness of the ground between them: sugar beet, hop poles, a farm track, and then a low white wall with sixty names in it, at the end of a field somebody is working.

Ypres itself deserves the second night for the same reason. The town chose to rebuild exactly what it had lost, then decided to sound a bugle call under the arch every evening for the rest of time, and it has kept both promises for a hundred years.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Do I need a car for the Ypres battlefields?
You need a car, a bike or a tour. The town itself is walkable but the cemeteries and museums are spread across twenty kilometres of farmland with next to no bus service. Half day and full day tours leave from the market square daily and are the easiest option if you would rather listen than navigate.
How long is enough?
Two nights covers the town, the northern salient and Poperinge without hurrying. A single day gets you the museum and the Menin Gate and none of the ground, which is the part that stays with people. Anyone tracing a particular grave should allow an extra half day for it.
Can I find a relative's grave?
Usually, and easily. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission's site gives you the cemetery and the plot from a name, every cemetery has a register at the entrance, and the staff at the museum in Ypres will help if the trail is cold. Nothing needs booking and nothing costs anything.
Is this suitable for children?
The museum in the cloth hall is designed for family visits and handles the subject carefully. The cemeteries are quiet, open places that children generally take in their stride. The execution cells at Poperinge are the one stop to think twice about.
What about the Somme and the French sector?
The Somme battlefields are about two hours south by car and are a separate trip rather than a day out from here. If you want another day in this area, the Yser front north towards Diksmuide has the Trench of Death and a German cemetery at Vladslo with the Kollwitz sculptures, and it is much quieter than the salient.