Briare

 The last blog wrongly stated Briare was 10 miles down the Loire. It’s 10 miles up the Loire, where our campsite takes your canoe so you can float down to Gien. It’s not as photogenic as Gien but it does have the longest canal aqueduct in Europe, built by M. Eiffel of Tower fame. It’s not as impressive as our Llangollen canal aqueduct but here it is, as it crosses the Loire, looking much like a sewerage pipeline.

Looking round from the aqueduct, we spotted a familiar contraption on the opposite bank. It’s the gypsy caravan with the young lad apparently sat on a chair in the river.

There are several canal systems meeting here. They are clearly much more reliable than the Loire for both leisure and transport, and are quite scenic.

Now back into town for a coffee in the church square. At the risk of  describing yet another cathedral or church, this one earns its place by being unusual, although it doesn’t look it from the outside, apart from the green mould.

It was built between 1890 and 1895, financed by the local enamel factory magnate. It was designed in the Byzantine style, like eastern European or Russian churches, because they are decorated in a way that the benefactor could display lots of enamel work. A closer look at part of the façade shows this treatment on the patterning over the doors and in the arches on the next level up.

Inside, the floors show eastern pattern design but not sure if it’s enamelwork?

The whole effect is of another time and place, but it is a regular Catholic church.

No more churches for a while, at least until the next blog! We headed then back to the campsite to prepare for moving off tomorrow for Abbeville, our last stop before home.

Gien

 Our campsite is opposite this picturesque small town on the banks of the river Loire. It was from here that we visited Bourges, blogged previously.

The Loire is the longest river in France at 630+ miles. However, it is the least navigable of France’s large rivers because for much of the year it is shallow with constantly changing sandbars. In the past, when rivers were an important highway, it was more used and better managed with debris cleared and navigable channels maintained. Today its main use is for leisure, so this is the kind of craft we saw using the river, nothing more substantial than this paddleboarder. It makes the pleasure cruisers and narrowboats on our river Ouse seem like ocean liners.

The Loire in flood is another matter, and we saw flood marks that stretch the imagination. This one indicates a level of 7.3 metres (24 feet 3 inches) on a house on the main road, far above the current river level.

There were a couple of house boats tied up along the bank, again, very small and of garden shed design.

We climbed up a steep staircase to the castle and church occupying the top level of the town. The castle is now a museum, the museum of hunting, which didn’t inspire us to enter.

 

We did get a nice view of our campsite from the top and of the river.

So down we go, a different way, and come across a statue that seems to be bent on stopping the traffic. The plaque says it’s Vercingetorix - so who’s he? Well, oddly, he popped up way back in school. Vercingetorix was the chief of the Arverni tribe that united much of Gaul (mostly today’s France) in a revolt against Roman rule. He is still seen today as a symbol of French unity although he came up against Julius Caesar and lost. He’s not having much success with the traffic either.

The banks of the Loire contain many footpaths and cycle tracks. The campsite offers bike and canoe hire for those interested. We stuck to walking and came across lots of interesting things, this gypsy caravan for instance. It was trundling along the meadow path next to the river and then stopped for the horses to feed. We caught up with it, and from a halting conversation with the young guy on his own, it was clear he was a real Romany and this was his home.

We have another little trip out before we leave Gien, 10 miles down the Loire to Briare.

Bourges: 1st June

 Bourges is Peterborough’s twin town, so we thought we’d drop in to see how it compared as we were staying in the area. We parked in a modern multistorey on the Avenue de Peterborough at the edge of the old town and walked into this delightful old squares. Bourges Boulevard in Peterborough also contains car parks and direct access to the city centre.

The old town streets are almost all original medieval buildings, for example this road leading to the cathedral.

We are reminded that Bourges is on one of the great pilgrimage routes by the cockleshell symbols inlaid into the paving.

The cockleshells inevitably lead to the large cathedral of 13^th century construction.

Inside, it’s amazingly tall. They used cutting edge building techniques for its day.

The really stunning feature is the original stained glass. They clearly had no local Cromwell to wreck what he considered unnecessary ornamentation. The photo is but a small sample of the stained glass, each piece of which tells a biblical story.

There’s also an intricate clock made for the wedding of Charles VII to Marie d’Anjou here in 1422. It looks like it’s portable, like a carriage clock, but it’s 15 feet tall and Charles VII is not described as a giant. 

Outside, some of the carvings are amazingly detailed, scenes of Judgement Day that can’t be fully appreciated from the photo. Thankfully, it’s scary stuff!

There are some fine touches on individual buildings in the streets, like this lion face that looks like he’s burst into song.

The palace of Jacques Coeur is the largest and most ornate in the city. He was a shipping merchant, moneylender and arms dealer: a Mr Big, and also Charles VII’s finance minister.

We do the tourist info map circuit and end up back at the car park.

Peterborough has a long history, but nothing like the number of old buildings surviving as in Bourges. The cathedrals stand comparison: Peterborough’s is slightly older and each are of great historical significance. The outskirts of the cities are, superficially, similar with unremarkable suburbs.

It’s an hour’s drive back to the campsite when we later had this lovely sunset.

 

St Germain Les Belles

 In the 16^th century King Henry IV of France stayed in the village of St Germain and was welcomed by so many handsome female wellwishers that he ordered the village be renamed St-Germain-Les-Belles-Filles. Somehow the “Filles” (ladies) bit has dropped off, so it’s now just “St Germain the Beautiful”. We certainly got a beautiful pitch in the campsite right by the lake.

The village itself looks solid. The old lock-up looks like it could safely house the Kray twins.

The church is a fortified church, so much the same style, no doubt served by a well fortified priest.

But there are some pretty buildings like the bakery/newsagents.

Grocery shopping needs the supermarkets of the nearest town, Uzerche, but we have a look around first. The old town is built on a rocky pinnacle in a loop of the river. The way up is impressive.

After coffee and a croissant, we entered the old town through the fairy-tale gatehouse.

At the centre is another massive church, oddly next to a modern, very ordinary house

More old buildings as we strolled through the streets. This is the 14^th century tower of the Black Prince. The plaque didn’t say if it was built by our Black Prince, the son of Edward III, as the date is right and he did lead armies to conquer parts of France including this area. But maybe you’d just play down a defeat.

We saw lots more of these fairy-tale roofs and buildings, e.g.as in the next two photos.

Now we’re back down to river level, so here’s the river, the Vezere, that almost encircles the old town.

We looked over to the opposite bank and saw that the old houses there, although not so ancient, were of fairy-tale quality. One asks oneself - how many overhangs could they build upwards before it all comes crashing down into the river?

These old places have a timeless harmony that we struggle to achieve with modern towns, but future generations will surely be drooling over our windfarms, electricity pylons and new towns that we find so depressing. So hang on in there Corby and Stevenage!

Condom: 25th May

We travelled the 7 miles to Condom to do some supermarket shopping as La Romieu is only a tiny village. Let’s deal with the elephant in the room right now and say that we stopped bringing back local gifts for family and friends many years ago!

It’s a pleasant town with a long history and many old buildings, and was part of the English Crown for a time from 1152 when Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry II.

Almost always there’s a lovely church or cathedral, and here it is, built in the 16^th century.

Beautiful stained glass inside set off by the harmonious proportions of the pillars.

Outside we saw a statue of four swordsmen – the three musketeer. It seems no. 4 comes as an extra freebee. The story is set vaguely in this area, but apart from these statues we didn’t see any Three Musketeers tearooms or Porthos’ Pubs etc.

The cathedral and statues form part of the central square, all in this very light stone. Condom is also on the pilgrim route, so we saw a few more cockleshell heroes. But wait – there’s a pilgrim’s donkey here as well, tied up behind the church. On closer examination it turns out to be the very same donkey we photographed in La Romieu, so the pilgrim (+ donkey) has plodded on another 7 miles since the day before yesterday.

The town is on a hill as were many old communities for defence reasons, so we walked down the hill to the car park by the river. There were a number of vacant shops on the way but the painting of different scenes on each frontage helped to take away the air of dereliction.

We finish with a pleasant river scene. River trade must have been important in past times but the quay opposite is now used as a car park. We didn’t notice anywhere a town coat of arms and wondered, as a parting shot, what it might consist of. Maybe it’s the single “adults only” coat of arms in France.

La Romieu

 We are in the Gers region of France, 100 miles from the Spanish border. We didn’t know where that was either, but we’ve struck lucky with this lovely old walled village, walkable from the spacious campsite. You enter the village through a gate in the wall.

Once inside, the village retains a medieval feel, as the next two photos show.

The village was established as a stopping point for pilgrims by two German monks, in 1082, on their return journey from a pilgrimage to Santiago in Spain. It became an increasingly important centre for pilgrims so that by the 14^th century one of the Pope’s local  administrators decided to build a huge church incorporating fortified walls enclosing the village.  The church and walls look impressive even now.

The church was attached to a monastery constructed at the same time. The cloisters can be seen, but are almost crumbling away.

We noticed an ancient funeral cart parked in a corner, too flimsy to be in current use, but maybe ok as a prop in a Dracula film.

La Romieu is still an important stage for pilgrims heading to Santiago using the ancient pilgrimage route, now designated as long distance path GR35. Pilgrims bound for Santiago traditionally wear a cockleshell symbol and we observed many walkers with this emblem. One such pilgrim even had a donkey loaded with his clothes and camping gear, probably as many medieval pilgrims would have done ( but without the ipad).

The village has another story to tell: the legend of Angéline. She was an orphan who surrounded herself with cats for companionship. Then, after several consecutive years of famine, the villagers were forced to eat their cats to survive. But Angéline had kept some of hers hidden away. Now came a good harvest, but the grain was being eaten by rats as there were no cats left to control them. Ah, but there were, and Angéline’s heroes saved the day! It is said she even got to look like a cat, as this stone carving outside the tourist office indisputably shows.

The fun bit is that, as her cats are the emblem of the village, there are numerous cat effigies to be spotted in various places. A kind of feline “where’s Wally” hunt; for example:

The village is really beautiful, and the church/monastery bears another photo from a different perspective.

Getting back to the real world, the communal wash place was in use until the last century. It is fed by one of the many springs issuing from under the village. It reminds us that times past weren’t defined by the romantic old buildings we see today – life was often unbelievably tough, so hang on to your cats!