Cows, cheese and mountain top burons

We have moved to the mountains. Our choice this morning was between the route for lentils (via du Puys) and the route for cheeses (via the Cantral mountains). The cheese route won – though it was a close call, and we all want to come back sometime soon to do the lentil route. Mayhap next year. 

All day we have been spiralling the high country of the Massif Central – land so high we have seen no caravans and only two other motorhomes enroute. Our little camping car has us dizzy keeping up with it on the circuitous mountain tracks that, in some cases, are only wide enough for a brace of motorbikes.

We are taking the Route du Fromage, avoiding small herds of fat brown and white milking cows wandering after lush green grasses, who have chosen the sensible option of wearing bells, so these hills are alive with the soft tinkle of their cowbells. The scenery, too, is lifted flawlessly from the Sound of Music overture. 

We stop enroute at the beautiful little Romanesque churches of Saint Saturnin and Saint Nectaire. It is Sunday, so this is totally appropriate, and as we walk the delightfully archaic and authentic streets of St Saturnin we smell Sunday lunch cooking in every historic little townhouse, hidden behind medieval gates and teeny doors. Everywhere, we hear and see families gathering, indoors and out, for the expansive Sunday repasts. We pass their well kept gardens: fat tomatoes, cucumbers and beans, still ripe on the vines, herbs, root vegetables, flowers. There is no need to go to a store in these parts. Self reliance – and fresh organic products – are so valued. 

At Saint Nectaire we have our lunch in the centre ville parked in front of its perfectly kept church. The cure has violin solo pieces playing softly and is advertising a duet concert tomorrow in the evening. I would love to be here then. The acoustics are superb, as is the perfect little church with its amazing capitols in the nave and choir. One hundred and three of them, typifying the miracles Saint Nectaire performed to gain sainthood. Though I see, from the musee, that Saint Nectaire’s gloved armour is missing a finger or two: probably in battle: I pat his head soothingly, as we leave. Such a lovely place. 

Visiting all these saints has Peter’s brain in gear. He has decided, after much deliberation, but particularly after Lourdes and yesterday’s visit to Saint Bernadette’s chaisse, that Bec must move into the market of doing saintly deeds. That way he can become rich. All he has to do, he says, is to market her miracles, and the hoards will come running, throwing their many coins at Saint Rebecca. He has been coaching her all day. 

For lunch we eat from a round of the world famous Saint Nectaire cheese: it is soft, nutty, and salivatingly moreish, and it comes from the buttery cows tinkling enroute.  Who needs nectar? Oh, cry, Will Stubbs, cry!

As we drive higher we notice tiny stone huts, built into the sides of barren rock scarred hills. These with sloping roofs daubed and sodden with a mix of earth, dung and grass. These are the burons where, not so long ago, lone cowherders, al la Brokeback Mountain, would stay for the entire season, minding herds of Cantal cattle: guarding them, sleeping lightly, gathering firewood, boiling and sterilizing the cheesecloths, filtering the collected milk, pressing the separated curd, draining the liquid whey, storing and turning the ronds of cheese that they then stacked against the walls of the burons, well cooled from the midday sun.

After more dizzying heights, and as the sun sets over this bucolic setting, we head to our campsite: a large pond, edged with purple wildflowers, a cascading spring to one side, where an old man is fishing with a soft floaty red fly flashing in the sun, and a noisy cow in the field behind with the bell around his neck pitched to high volume. 

Tonight we eat porc en brochette and wee saucissons, potatoes mashed with eschallotes, and lettuce wilted in warmed garlic infused crème fraiche.  We will sleep to the sound of cow bells.

Massif Central

Burons for the hardy shepherds

Cow bells ringing

Saints and bombs

Tonight we are parked in a vineyard, south of Moulin, eating our appetiser of salade caprese with the most amazing locally grown Ratafia aperitif that Pete tells me is about 18% alcohol. So if incoherence sets in it is definitely because of the grape. Today we came across Saint Bernadette. In the flesh. Albeit, in a coffin.

We drove past beautiful rolling hills to stop at a Bar-Tabac for our coffee. Bec keeps ordering cappuchino, and the baristas, in fine fettle, keep squirting half a siphon of whipped cream to top hers, for decoration. We are going to have to teach her how to say: Café au lait to go with her compleat French vocabulary collected to date which is: ‘Messy’, translated: Merci, thanks to Ian Bonney, her skilled language teacher.

With incredible cheek we drove into a delightful rural municipal campground at Varzy, helped ourself to their facilities and lunched beside their primetime viewing canal where half the population of Bourgogne were busy fishing.

Then on to Nevers, to see the blue, green and yellow porcelain that the town is famous for, a la Limoge. Again, our luck was in, and despite it being a Saturday, when most things are closed in rural France, we happened upon an exposition of the specialist ceramics in the veuille ville, which we just loved.

We followed that up with a tour of a studio of a nouvelles ceramics china painter using traditional means and inspiration, who spoke no English, but somehow we were simpatico. We chatted about china and painting and told him of the tricks of a friend of ours who once painted for Wedgwood. We’d likely still be waffling on, had Pete not turned up from his Cathedral photo shoot, scooting us along.

Which is how we found the body of Saint Bernadette. After our disastrous visit to Lourdes a couple of years ago, where half the population of the world was apparently on a pilgrimage to Bernadette at Lourdes, we had thought we had seen the last of the saint after whom I was named. Not so. We accidently came upon her remains in Nevers.

The Sisters of Charity of Nevers happened to have been in Lourdes at the time of Bernadette's apparitions, caring for poor impoverished marginalised waifs exactly like Bernadette, whose father, once a miller, was now unemployed, living in a dilapidated unused mill, unable to feed his family of four unfortunate young children. 

Bernadette, the eldest, was likely hungry and hallucinating at the time of the visions; she’d already suffered a touch of the cholera and her health, throughout her life, generally, was poor. The good nuns rescued her from the notorious publicity that ensued after her visions, and cast her as one of their ilk when she was but a sweet young thing, barely young enough to know yay from nay.

She moved to the mother house of the Convent of Saint-Gildard at Nevers, where she lived for thirteen more years, acting as a nursing assistant and sextant whenever she was well enough. She died in Nevers when she was 35, on Wednesday, April 16, 1879. 

Her body was found to be incorruptible, or so it is said. So, in 1925 it was moved to the Chapel of Saint Gildard, where it lies in state today in a glass case, the only touch of embalment being a little wax on her hands and face. So it is said. But, if that is really her, she’s a pretty little thing, smaller by far than my teeny great-aunts who were all under 5 feet with a beautifully fine-boned nose. And she looks incredibly peaceful, so one would think she died calmly.

We headed, then, into the centre ville for a long walk and found there another cathedral but as Bec and I are done with Cathedrals for the moment, we would not have entered except, from the entrance, we could see some amazing examples of leaded glass which drew us in. The glass windows were all new, the top section of the church having been almost completely destroyed by bombs in July 1944. But money was found in the 1970s and five leaded glass artisans were commissioned to fill the glass gap damage. And there were gaps everywhere.

And everywhere the glass artisans had their say. They produced contemporary works, cubist works, abstract works and pop art windows in leaded glass. The colours used are modern bright hues, the designs are artist-specific, and so astonishing it is to see modern-art glass dressing medieval churches that it will likely be a hundred years or more before this is considered real art. But we just loved it. The bright sharp modern colours brought pizzaz to that medieval space, giving it life, energy and effervescent spirit.

Vineyards as we're driving

Nevers porcelain 

St Bernadette, in repose

Red and modern glass 

Contemporary stained glass pieces 

Artifacts and atrocities

My equal favourite night time stops, on a par with our wonderful ferme du agricole or vinyard sites, are the historic river banks where we can watch flotillas of river traffic out one window; or out the other, ancient cathedrals lofting high, lit up as if for a festival. Tonight is just so. We are parked on the banks of the Yonne River hugging Auxerre, one of the prettiest villages in the Burgundy region of France and the lights in the centre ville are twinkling around church spires, romantically. 

We are moving south to our destination in the Pyrennees, but not quickly. I think we’ve covered barely 80 kilometres today. And we’ve walked our feet limp, and, now, have them up while we await the sautéing of the chicken breasts, mushrooms, lardoons and onions which are to be tossed in crème fraiche, then served with fluffy steamed rice. Light and lovely. 

No big beefy Burgundian feasting tonight, as we’ve already eaten our entrée, gougere, which is a cheese puff speciality (a savoury version of sweet chou) famous locally, and on every menu we have passed this evening. Along with the famous local Chablis. For over eighteen hundred years, (imagine it!) hills around Auxerre have provided France, and the rest of world, with some of the finest Chablis ever produced. So, of course we partake. 

We bought the gougere, ready baked, at a boulangerie on our walking tour, along with a sinful raspberry dessert. Which looks nowhere near as decadent as our lunchtime treat: wicked rum-drenched-bitter-chocolate cooled into a thick crust over sweet layers of caramelised apples on pastry. This should have been a sickening combination, but, truly, it was divine. In our pastry rating competition, this one takes number one spot to date. 

Not only are the pastries here irresistible, but the artisan bakery assistants take the time to package all our bakery buys as gorgeous little gift wrapped treats, each time. With trim. So each meal tends to feel like a party, opening a present at treat time. Ah, the food, Surely one of the best reasons to travel. 

We came to Auxerre via Pontigny. There we sipped our double espresso in a Bar Tabac where the seasoned locals were already hitting their blood pumping early morning hard liquor shots. We then found, in a tiny roadside village, a massive Abbey open to the public. Many fine artefacts from various stages in its past still survive, but one of the most interesting was a massive circular lavabo, or shallow stone sink, over 3.5 metres in diameter, which was originally used in the refectory in the 12th century, so the monks could purify their hands before repast. 

The Abbey itself had a mixed history. Before and after the first war a wealthy French intellectual, Paul Desjardins, owned it, and each summer ran international discussions, each scheduled to last for precisely 10 days. These, then, were called Decades. They were a little like our current global think-tank sessions, and he invited great thinkers from all walks of life to reflect upon topics of literary, political, social and economic interest with a leaning towards peace. 

During the war, the Abbey was run as a military hospital and must have been quite sumptuous, as one of the 1916 convalescents wrote: “ We live in dream surroundings, lodged on the first floor in a luminous Roman hall whose origins are unknown. We eat on the ground floor in a former monastic refectory; under ogival arches – we drink the cider of the yard.” Even in wartime, some things in France remained so very civilised.

Auxerre, too, has holy buildings numerous enough and large enough to fill a small city. Tonight, we expected peals of chuch bells from all corners of this tiny town, for there are so many. More war drama we found at the beautiful Cathedrale St-Etienne in the old town. Sadly, when Auxerre was sacked by the Huguenots in 1567 a small army of frenzied invaders set about decapitating many of the tiny statues in the external arch at the cathedral’s entrance. Cleanly beheaded, these little figurines still sit there today. Imperfect in stone. Another reminder of the atrocities of war.

Our Yonne River campsite

Gougere, French cheese puffs

French pastry to die for

Lavabo was originally in the rectory for the monks to wash their hands before meals

Huguenots beheaded these statues four hundred years ago

Peaceful now, not so then

Chagall, champagne and cloisters

Each morning we follow our noses and hunt down the best, the purest, the richest espresso in town, to kick-start our day. Today, this trek lands us in a busy little boulevard café in the very heart of the town of Reims (pronounced, would you believe: Rrrrahnce). Slap bang in front of us is a magnificent Gothic cathedral, draped in stone gargoyles, statues of ermine-robed kings and winged angels flying atop. 

The Reims cathedral, we discover, is where the kings of France, traditionally, were crowned. Almost all of them. And here, thanks to her successful sacking of Orleans, Joan of Arc was able to occupy pride of place while watching her mentor, Charles V11, accept his crown. A statue of a very tiny fleur-de-lis bedecked Jeanne d’Arc (Bec thinks she looks like a little man) stands in pride of place in an alcove lit on one side by a triptich of stunning stained glass windows designed by Marc Chagall. 

Chagall, born a Russian Jew, was so immersed in bible rhetoric as a child that, as an adult, he could easily conjure up esoteric religious abstraction and colour brittle shards of that passive medium, glass, into something fluid, floating, moving with the sun. His windows are blue Van Gogh swirls in glass. Amazing. I blink back tears at the beauty of it. 

We spend most of today in Champagne territory. We see individual champagne bottles priced at 2,500€, grand vineyard mansions along the expensive Avenue de Champagne in Epernay, including Moet et Chandon and we visit the Mercier champagne vineyards. These champagne grapes are tiny, not fat and round, in tight clusters, and when he first brewed up this concoction--by accident, as is the way with most brilliant discoveries---Dom Perignon exclaimed to his brothers: “Oh, do come and see the stars!” 

These medieval monks had a wonderful life, supping and sipping this delicious harvest from their vineyards. Yet, they are not infallible. In Chalon-sur-Champagne, in the little courtyard behind the Notre Dame en Vaux Eglise, a group of monks from the middle ages smashed a set of the most exquisite cloisters ever built in France. Clearly their classical elegance was not to their taste. They chopped up the cloister statuary and buried it as foundation rubble for new mansions they were building atop. 

Gorgeous little statuettes and elegant colonnades were lost forever, forgotten forever, until, in the late 1960s, builders, involved in reconstruction in this back street, happened upon the debris of some unexplained, yet clearly significant objects. They went seeking an explanation. 

And thank god for archives and archivists. No one alive could offer any clarification for the existence of these objects d’art, so specialist historians were called in. They rooted deep in the dusty library archives and found ancient maps and drawings of what now are recognised as an extraordinarily beautiful set of medieval cloisters. With painstaking determination, archaeologists, historians and skilled craftsmen helped to reconstruct this unique collection of colonnades from chunks of rubble the size of dry stone rocks. Two delightful priests guard the collection, lovingly. “Unique”, they whisper to us in the hope that we understand. We do, and we can only agree. 

Tonight we sleep in another farm complex, setting out our dining table and chairs under heavily laden ripe damsons and apricot trees. These must be fruiting everywhere, as we ate these at lunch time, too, served atop sweet rich pastry from a wonderful Epernay patisserie. Tonight we eat them fresh with cheese: our dessert. We seem to be eating very close to the earth in Europe. So far our larder includes fresh tart apples that we’ve twisted from a Shropshire tree, day-old eggs fresh from home-grown chickens, along with the local honey, mead beer, and fruit of the fields in Pays de Champagne. 

Reims Cathedral

Joan of Arc in Reims

Swirls of blue in glass

Medieval cloisters rebuilt from rubble 

Under the damson trees

No roses in Picardy

Our breakfast is an international melange: French - exquisite fresh bread; German - Aldi’s brilliant fruit and nut muesli; and our Aussie standby: vegemite, which we bought across with us as we can't seem to do without it overseas. 

We head out amid peaceful green fields and discover we are in Picardy. There are no roses in Picardy. But there are graves. Never-ending fields of symmetrical, meticulously kept war graves. Oddly, we would not have chosen to come this way. We usually avoid war areas and war memorabilia, as philosophical objectors. 

We were woken by sunlight and the smell of fresh baked French bread wafting through the motorhome windows from the village boulangerie. All so at peace. It is only when we pass a sign identifying the region as the sight of one of the bloodiest battles in the Great War, the Somme, that I begin to think some of my Irish heritage is kicking in, and that fate, and the Irish faeries, have drawn us here. I suddenly realise that it is here that my funny fat little Grandfather Harry went quite bonkers. When he was only seventeen. 

Here, he lay in a trench that he had dug to protect himself, shivering in the only warmth he owned, his Army-issue greatcoat; his blisters raw and bleeding in ill-fitting army boots as he tried, under orders, to take potshots at other boys, as young as he was, barely 17, just out of sight, just over the hill, trying to hide, too, in their shallow dugout shelters, all of them shivering in mind-bending fear. 

The fields they fought are now littered with silent earth covered bodies, topped with white crosses; and, sometimes, red poppies. The boys are two to a grave, ten graves wide, seventeen rows deep. I count 340 to each plot. And, tragically, here are 20 more massive plots. That makes seven thousand innocents, not yet men, lying buried in this field alone. And this is one field. There are thousands upon thousands more in each burial field as we silently pass. 

Down this row of plane trees lining the road my grandfather likely marched with his battalion. Into this tiny village church, under this spire, he probably crept to pray. To stay alive. Even shell-shocked and witless. Wave after battlefodder wave of these young men who set out from Australia, Canada, Britain, France and Germany in that Great War, fell for the last time on these Flanders fields. Where wild poppies now bow their tall heads in the summer. At the intolerable senselessness of it all. The day stretches on, past the endless mass of simple white crosses standing symmetrical in every field. 

We have, as always in France, invitations to park our motorhome in wonderful rural locations throughout France, all for free. Tonight we are parked in one of the loveliest we’ve visited. It is a farm, in the heart of another village, opposite another church, with another lovely church bell tolling away gentle hours from its tower. 

The farmhouse is large. Its two stories front the village street with its back into a gardened courtyard. The outhouses, including stone and stuccoed homes for permanent farm workers, large barns, and neat machinery sheds are all built around the perimeter of a large internal square.

Like the old fortified bastides of earlier days. It all feels very secure, womb-like. 

Monsieur Alain, the owner, greets us and encourages Bec to take a walk beyond the farm gates to visit the donkeys, ponies, geese, rabbits, pigs and chickens in the fields. As usual, the animals flock to her and she is generous with her pats. 

After a long walk around the village we buy local honey and aged beer, reminiscent of how I imagine medieval mead must have tasted, and it is all utterly delicious! And, again, we marvel how much better everything seems to taste in France. Dinner tonight is fennel with wine-doused steak. We finish off with something wicked (abricot tartlette) from this morning’s village boulangerie. We fall asleep smiling, and wake when a cockerel crows.

Field after endless field of war graves

Our farmhouse stop for the night

Lost in France

We are lost in France. We are supposed to be following in the footsteps of Van Gogh to Arles, Rick Stein along the Canal du Midi, and the Cathars to Montsegur, but already we are in disarray. 

On our first night out of England – sodden, grey, depressing England at the moment -- we find ourselves parked for the night in a patch of late evening sunlight in a tiny village in an obscure little commune somewhere south of the Dover-Calais ferry yet north of Paris. 

We know that much. We are not where we intended to be, as we didn’t book ahead, and it is summer, and everyone is on the move, so when we arrived ad hoc at our selected nightspot Madame was fully occupied with other camping cars, so off we ambled following her directions in voluble French to find parking in this quiet village square but a few kilometres away where we are to spend the night.  

North, south, east or west we have no real clue where we’ve actually ended up. 

There is an Alimentaire, a pharmacy, opened onto our square, just steps from where we are parked. Its green light, in the shape of a gentle cross, is always a comforting sign. To the nearside of us there is an ecole, closed yet for the summer, pour l’enfants. Kitty-corner sits a very dignified Mairie (Mayors office)– not opened this night, as it is August, and the mayor, and and all the rest of France, are still on their summer holidays. 

Except the local farmers in their tractors who are now heading home to roost, buzzing around our square, one after the other, with a nose to the breeze sniffing our supper of fat caramelised pork chops and Bramley applesauce that we have brought across on the ferry.  

Our village church at the corner tolls the soft, gentle, rhythm of life, tapping away the hours we are awake, then as we sleep, it, too, sleeps, setting up its charge again in the early morning hours. J’approve. 

The name of our village we soon discover is Neuville Saint Vaast. We have never heard of it.

We didn’t know there was a Saint named Vaast until this morning when we unearthed our stored French guide books from the box underneath one of the dining seats to find out where we were. Nicholas, was his name.  He may well be looking out for us.  

Bless you, Nicholas: we slept like logs, wrapped in the quiet of our placid village square, encircled by tall-trunked green trees dripping with seeds and nuts.  Sometimes it is lovely to be lost.

Our spot of the night

The Mairi and the Church