www.rouentourisme.com. Drivers should follow signs for Centre Rive Droite. There is underground parking in place du Marché, off rue Jeanne d’Arc. Arrive in Rouen between 12-2pm, and you are doomed to lunch. However, a spot of lunch and a wander around the carefully restored medieval town centre with its tall, half-timbered facades is no hardship. Place du Marché is a sensible place to start, grouped around the modern eye-sore Eglise de Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc. The church’s steeply-pitched roof is intended to evoke the flames that engulfed the sainted scourge of the English on the spot marked by the 65-foot Croix de la Réhabilitation; there is no apparent explanation for the covered walkway looking like a scaly dragon’s tail. The interior (two boat hulls laced together with girders), incorporates some lovely stained glass rescued from a church destroyed in 1944. Next door to the church, a small covered market is useful for collecting picnic ingredients.

Rue du Gros Horloge leads towards the cathedral, straddled by a fancy clock tower. The adjacent belfry gives a bird’s-eye view of Vieux Rouen and beyond. North of here, the Palais de Justice, rue aux Juifs, has a marvellous 16thC courtyard.

Housed in an enchanting Renaissance building facing the cathedral square, the tourist office offers guided walking tours in summer. Opposite, Monet would hardly recognize the recently scrubbed fa√笵cade of the Cathédrale de Notre-Dame which he immortalized in a series of studies exploring the effects of light. The monumental Gothic masterpiece bristles with decorative pinnacles, statuettes and twiddly bits with the grime of ages cleaned to reveal its pristine state. The Porte Calende, in the south wall, boasts afurther wealth of carvings and reliefs in the manner of strip cartoons. The great nave rests on clusters of pillars with simple capitals, and soars into a dramatic lantern tower above the transept. On the right, the Booksellers’ Stairway is a delightful zigzag affair; to penetrate the ambulatory and Richard the Lionheart’s tomb, you have to take a guided tour.

Rue Saint-Romain is a picture-book medieval street with house fronts leaning out over the pavement. Look for the carvings on No. 74; and duck into the Booksellers’ Courtyard for another carved cathedral porch. Further along, there is a fine view of the lantern tower silhouetted through a bare window in the former archbishop’s palace where Joan of Arc was tried. Rouen faïence and print shops gather in force around the Eglise de Saint-Maclou, another Gothic marvel with a finely carved Renaissance door on the left. Take rue Martinville for the Aître Saint-Maclou, a secluded square of 16thC half-tim-bered buildings. Once a charnel house and burial ground for plague victims, it is decorated in macabre style with carved skulls, crossed bones and grave digging equipment.

The former Abbatiale Saint-Ouen, is the final link in the Seine abbey trail. Dating from the 13th-15thC, it is a striking example of pure Gothic architecture, simpler, stronger and bigger than the cathedral, and surrounded by pretty gardens.

Rouen’s museums are conveniently gathered together off rue Thiers. The Museé Le Secq des Tournelles, housed in a former church on the corner of rue Jacques-Villon, offers an intriguing collection of wrought ironwork, utensils and jewellery; the Museé des Beaux-Arts (www.mbaronen.fr), is particularly well-endowed with French paintings from the 17th-20thC; and Rouen’s popular ceramics take the biscuit in the Museé de Céramique, rue Faucon.