Marvellous Menton: The French border town where rugby, fine dining and lemons meet

As France gears up to host the Rugby World Cup, Chrissie McClatchie explores the fascinating Riviera town where the sport’s inventor was laid to rest, and finds a destination full of youthful swagger, Michelin-starred restaurants and a rediscovered, citrus-inspired zest

Menton’s Esplanade des Sablettes has found a new energy (Isabelle Fabre)

In 1859, gripped by consumption, a British physician called James Henry Bennet packed his suitcases for one final journey. His destination was Menton, the last huff of France before Italy. “I wrapped my robes around me, and departed southwards … to die in a quiet corner, as I and my friends thought,” he would later write. To his, and his friends, great surprise, “under its genial sky, freed from the labours and anxieties of my former life … I soon began to rally”.

The term Côte d’Azur had yet to be coined (that would come two decades later under the pen of French author Stephen Liégard), but, inspired by Bennet’s account of his recovery, Winter and Spring on the Shores of the Mediterranean, other Brits flocked to the delightful border town to heal their ailments. Among them, the man credited with inventing rugby, William Webb Ellis. Alas, for Webb Ellis at least, Menton’s mild climate wasn’t the miracle cure he had come in search of. Six months after his arrival, in January 1872, he succumbed to what is widely believed to be tuberculosis.

Webb Ellis rests in Menton’s lofty Cimetière du Vieux Château, in a modest grave high above a sea that glimmers under the gaze of the southern French sun. The site has become a pilgrimage for fans of the sport, who come bearing treasured rugby balls to leave alongside freshly cut flowers as tokens of gratitude. In the leadup to a Rugby World Cup in France, it’s even more of a focal point.