A walk along all 68 metres of 1066
Nearly seventy metres of 1066 in wool on linen. No queue, no timed slot, and nobody nudging you along.
Laying the linen…
A non-commercial fan project using the official 2017 photography of the City of Bayeux, via Wikimedia Commons. Not affiliated with the British Museum or the Bayeux Museum.
Six details, one clock. Can you find them on the real cloth?
You'll see a close-up of the tapestry. Walk to the dashed zone on the ruler, find that exact spot and tap it. The zone narrows the longer you look. A wrong tap costs 3 seconds; skipping costs 10.
Ten details hidden along the cloth. Walk until a red pin appears, then tap it.
You made it to the end, which is more than the tapestry did: its last metres are lost.
A gallery wall built in a morning by Claude, from open photography and open-source tools.
This is an independent fan project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the British Museum, the Bayeux Museum or the photographers.
An embroidery, strictly speaking: coloured wool stitched onto linen.
The Bayeux Tapestry runs almost 70 metres and about half a metre high. It tells the story from Harold Godwinson's journey to Normandy through William's invasion and the Battle of Hastings in 1066, ending with the English in flight. It was probably commissioned by a Norman patron, stitched by English embroiderers, and drawn from manuscript models from Canterbury, sometime around 1072–77.
On loan from France, it is back in England for the first time since it was made: Room 30, 10 September 2026 to 11 July 2027. Tickets through December are sold out; January to March 2027 tickets go on sale 21 October 2026. Exhibition page
This is the real tapestry, hung at true scale, from the official 2017 photography: made by La Fabrique de patrimoines en Normandie for the City of Bayeux and DRAC Normandie, with the Université de Caen Normandie, CNRS and ENSICAEN. Wikimedia Commons hosts the scene-by-scene files and marks them as public domain. The scene files were joined into one continuous strip and cropped to the cloth. The captions group the 58 traditional scenes into 30 sections, and the Latin is given with abbreviations expanded and spelling lightly regularised. Captions and facts were fact-checked against museum and scholarly sources; see "How this was made".
The running count of people, horses and ships is an estimate spread across the scenes and scaled to Reading Museum's count of about 626 people, 190 horses and 37 ships. Other counts differ a little: some give 41 ships and boats. The map is a rough sketch for orientation.