Roll off the boat, or out of the tunnel, at Calais and you’ve a day’s driving to the Luberon, the Dordogne or other celebrated southern spots. You can, by contrast, be in Guînes in 10 minutes.

No question, the Pas-de-Calais region is handy. Then again, so is your local Spar. Handiness of itself does not ensure a good time. Just as well this slice of far-northern France has a great deal more. Far from the industrial jungle of popular image, it’s an overwhelmingly rural expanse, with villages folded into wooded valleys and towns of historical panache.

Yet few of them have any sense of their own attractiveness. You get the impression that prettiness is something that simply happened while folks’ minds were on other matters — working the land, trading, drinking beer or playing host to most of Europe’s biggest wars. Which, incidentally, have left a network of sites lending considerable depth to a lovely landscape.

This is a modest region with much to be immodest about. The Luberon and the Dordogne may be hotter, but the Pas- de-Calais compensates with warmth. For this itinerary, we’re assuming an arrival in Calais early-ish in the morning.

DAY ONE

Head out of town, along the canal, to Guînes and a first encounter with a typical little PdC town, all cottages, gardens and birdsong. The sprawl of Calais segues into this country spot without blinking. In its central square and streetlets, people bustle about their business, observed from first-floor balconies by ladies with housecoats and definite views.

It was probably much the same in 1520, when Henry VIII met François I at the nearby Field of the Cloth of Gold. This Euro summit had the monarchs showing off outrageously, but deciding almost nothing. The tale is told in the Tour de l’Horloge museum (Rue du Château; £3.40).

Meanwhile, the summit site itself is off a dead-straight bit of the road to Ardres. It’s marked with an unimpressive slab of stone, and the field once fleetingly filled with the 16th century’s most fabulous finery is now full of beetroot.

A little further on, Ardres banishes any lingering suspicions that the PdC lacks historical style. Park on Place d’Armes — sloping, triangular and trimmed with pointy-roofed old houses — for a flip around the centre. Then nip out of town to the tangle of lakes and marshes, a splendid bayou world adapted to leisure purposes.

If time allows, take a canoe. If not, take a coffee before continuing up and down secretive lanes to Eperlecques, chosen by Hitler as the spot from which to launch V-2s on London. There, lurking on the forested hillside like a gigantic concrete fist, is the 2½-acre assembly blockhouse, still radiating menace.

Go for the £9 joint ticket (it will also get you into La Coupole, this afternoon) and walk up through the trees, learning, via audio links, about the world’s first ballistic missile.

And so to St-Omer, a bright and settled place. Park and take the pedestrian Rue Louis- Martel to L’Audomaroise bar for a home-brewed beer. Stick around for lunch from the brasserie menu — or continue to the swisher Le Cygne, on Rue Caventou (00 33-3 21 98 20 52; menus from £10).

START THE afternoon at the glorious gothic cathedral. Note Rubens’s beautifully structured Deposition, the enormous nave-blocker of an organ, a 16th- century astrological clock and, most moving of all, St Erkembode’s tomb, covered in kids’ shoes. Erkembode is the saint who helps children with walking difficulties. Modern parents still have faith in him.

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