All the stuff you never knew you needed to know about life in rural France.....and all the stuff the books and magazines won't tell you.

Saturday 11 August 2012

A Road in France

My lawyer in Costa Rica is to take a holiday in France with her cousin.
Guidebooks have taken over from legal texts in her office and perusal makes it clear that they are visiting Paris and Provence. Nothing but Eiffel Towers and lavender to be seen.



They are travelling between the two by TGV, their hotels are booked and my lawyer is very excited.
She always loved the idea of France as a girl, but her school did not have enough pupils who wanted to learn French to allow her to learn the language, once spent a fortnight in Normandy as a young woman (it rained) and cannot wait to get on the 'plane.

At home after our meeting, I looked at the travel sections of the online newspapers...and there it was...Paris and Provence, Provence and Paris.... with just a nod to the Languedoc and to Burgundy.

Where's the rest of France?
The bits with Eiffel bridges and clocks and church towers that no one cares about...
The bits with fields of angelica or saffron instead of lavender

The bits that don't pull the crowds...

I used, when at a previous house, to take one road quite often....going to major town for the Saturday market, or to the hospital. There was another road...across country....but it took too long for someone trying to get a parking spot near the market before the crowds arrived, so it was the main road that I used.

A road through a France entirely foreign to those who commission travel pieces.

I would arrive at the main road from the side road through the woods where I would look for mushrooms every autumn, the junction marked by a granite celtic cross.

Unique in the area in its style, it and other crosses in the region were supposed to mark pre Christian assembly points and I was heartbroken when a lorry careened into it...the pieces were there, it could have been repaired....but it was replaced by a miserable, lumpish concrete cross painted dull yellow...the 'ton pierre' so beloved of the 'heritage' professionals of the department.

On to the main road.....and on the left the sinister spikes of what was known locally as Chateau Congelateur - Freezer Towers - could be seen rising over the tiled roofs of what had once been its home farm.
A fifteenth century building, over restored in the full Gothic style in the late nineteenth century, it was a fitting home for a doctor who believed in cryogenics.
He had retired there from Paris and was held to be a good doctor when acting as locum for his  local colleagues, once the patient could get over the fact that he never cut his hair and appeared to have a mandarin attitude to his nails.
He had installed a freezer in one of the outhouses which was, in due course, occupied by his wife, local speculation being rife as to whether she was dead when she went in.
There was a mighty ruction with Electricite de France when a power cut threatened to defrost her....EDF sought an order that he should have his wife buried, but contacts in Paris soon hit that idea on the head and the Prefect contented himself with telling him to buy a generator.
In his turn, he went in the freezer, the process supervised by his son - another doctor - but eventually the pressure of opinion was such that the son was forced to move his parents, freezer and all, to a location in Paris.
Chateau Congelateur was up for sale....but remained unsold years later when I was leaving not only the area but France itself.

The village behind had no less than seven chateaux of all ages and styles and had one of the rare monuments in the area to the Republicans of the era of the Vendee Wars.....the Royalist troops advancing, the maire and eleven others climbed up into the steeple to fire on them and, despite the Royalists firing the church under them, their musketry was enough to see off the danger.

In the twentieth century it was the home of a post impressionist Irish artist....
And I used to wonder if this work of his was from his garden there.

Further on the road, emerging from more woodland, the land began to rise, and the vineyards took over.
In the pre war period there was a tramway here, hauling wine from the hinterland to the big merchants on the Loire...the only trace left being the boxy French railway architecture of the little stations and crossing houses alongside the road.

Over the crest and into the outskirts of the town....by the time I left well supplied with supermarkets, DIY emporia and major outlet stores for clothes...very different from the days when tractors were parked outside the one supermarket as the old boys in wellies went in search of their wives' shopping.
But in the approaches to the mega sprawl stood an old building.

Known as the Carolingian palace, where Louis the Pious learned of the death of his father Charlemagne, it was nothing of the sort....the palace had been sacked in the Viking raids and the remnants of the materials had been used ro build a defensive tower much later.....but the mere belief demonstrated that this had once been an important town on the network of the old Roman roads.

Out of town...and on an improved route.
On the right, a turning for a village of troglodyte dwellings....not cliff dwellings as along the banks of the Loire, but dwellings hollowed out of the surrounds of a quarry, open to the sky, not like the miles of  tunnels now used by vignerons to mature their wine.  Not really a refuge either...but I suspect something to do with escaping taxes.

Flat land now, sloping gently away to the Loire.....but we're only half way and already we could have pulled off the road to explore the quarries, the gardens and the architecture....so time to take a break.

No wonder the editors don't commission stuff like this...it would take a book, not a third of a column....and they believe our attention span is the same as their own...negligable.


















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28 comments:

  1. Lovely blog, I'm with you every step of the way.

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    1. It must be the same in the area you settled in...so much going on and no tourist any the wiser....

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  2. If you want to know the real country ask someone who has lived there. Guidebooks point a traveller only to the bankers of those in the tourist trade.

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    1. How true....there's tourist Costa Rica, lining the pockets of the big boys and then there's Costa Rica...on the back roads...

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  3. ah well, with a bit of luck we might put a tiny dent in that attitude ;-). Plans are afoot; not saying anything now but we'll let you know if they come to fruition or burst.

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    1. I hope it's what I think it is and I'll buy a copy...

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  4. Dear Fly, redaing this has made me realise why I look forward to your posts so much. Despite hating the "crap" ( generic term to cover ex-pat gushings, political corruption, general disorganisation, petty bureaucracy etc etc) you love France with a beautifully informed passion. This has been my favourite of your posts ( I haven't read all the back catalogue yet). I love the Chateau Congelateur tale....just perfect. Your lawyer friend will not find such fascinating roads on her trip, unless she put you in her suitcase. J.

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    1. You have hit the nail on the head....my frustration with France is driven by fury at the sheer waste of human capability in the name of a system which proclaims equality....but there is so much to enjoy too and I've been lucky enough to have made friends who were keen to share their knowledge of their own area.

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  5. Hello:
    It is frightening. By which we mean the extent to which tourists, for they are seldom travellers, fail to stray off the well worn, beaten tracks of 'attractions', simply there to be ticked off, as recommended by their guide books or, worse still, what has been outlined in some colour supplement of a Sunday newspaper.

    Increasingly too, in major cities, such as Budapest, they appear not to be interested in anything beyond looking at shops with the sole aim of recognizing a store name familiar to them.

    All of that said, you give a wonderful account here of a little known area of France where life, or indeed death, remains relatively untouched.

    And was the frozen corpse finally buried?!!

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    1. Oh yes...tick the box stuff....how deadening to the soul.

      I have a nasty suspicion that people are less and less culturally informed...they have no eye for architecture...no sense of period...no idea of history.

      As far as I know the doctor and his lady are still deep frozen....somewhere in Paris.

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  6. My GPS has the happy feature of delineating the shortest route as well as the fastest one. The fast one is inevitably on major roads, the short one on all the little back roads such as you describe. Wonderful.

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    1. I'll have you know that in my area that was a main road!
      The back roads were something else...going through old coal mining villages along a tiny river...

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  7. People so often ask me where I find the interesting villages in France. Even people who live here in large cities. Certainly they are not on the tourist routes but they are all around us many within cycling distances. It is sad that people visit and generally miss so much of rural France. Enjoy your weekend Diane

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    1. Yes, but you make the effort to get out and look at places....and find some gems!

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  8. Our satnav. does not understand the word tourist and has taken us through some wonderfully unspoilt areas of France that I am sure we would never have seen if we had had to rely on map reading.

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    1. One of the Belgians has one like that...wonderful except when on a tight schedule for the airport!

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  9. Many travel page editors are in thrall to their advertisers, who only want to send people to Provence, etc. As you say there is so much more.

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    1. It must be frustrating for you.....and who are these advertisers who want to send people to Provence....

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  10. I spent a summer in Archachon, France during college. Though it's likely still touristy, it was nice to see something other than Paris. What a wonderful way to earn college credit. :)

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    1. Arcachon...home of the Dune and the annual ban on eating the oysters....

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  11. Isn't it always the way in every country? I hate the tourist trail. I love going off the beaten track. It's the only way to see the REAL country...and real people!

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    1. We used to take last minute package tours....and it astounded me that people would take the tours organised by the hotel rather than getting out of the compound and doing their own thing...
      We visited the Valley of the Kings by horse and trap from Luxor...not only did we have unlimited time there unlike the tour parties, but we also stopped off in a village to meet the driver's family, taste his uncle's grapes...great fun!

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  12. I am thinking of becoming a TIB, a this is belgium personal guide to people who want to travel out of the books and become a driver like yours in Luxor

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    1. That's a super idea.

      I first visited Belgium before 'acquiring' a Belgian family by marriage...and the difference between what I saw on my own and what they could show me was startling!

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  13. Sorry I’m a bit late Mme Fly. Veered off the beaten track a while back. Got hopelessly lost in the jungle. Couldn’t see the stars for the trees so I hacked around in circles for a little longer than anticipated. Several months longer in all truth. Long overdue for a change of scenery let alone menu. Boiled bat, lizard legs and mashed wood grubs every night becomes rather tiresome, and during the monsoon season you can rub two soggy sticks together for a week but all you’ll end up with is cold smoked bat, gristly lizard legs, a fistful of blisters and a very bad mood. Hence whilst in fever recovery mode, I thought I’d hack back in here instead for bit of long overdue catch up on the affairs of state in real France and Frenchdom from someone who's very much in the know.

    With you all the way with this topic. I’ve always been an ‘off pister’. Never could stand following the herds along the highways. When the kids were small we frequently used set off on long weekend drives before dawn to ‘nowhere in particular’, simply point the car up the road and keep going till we rolled up behind a trail of three or more slower vehicles on a main road or just a single vehicle in the case of country lanes, then take the very next turning off no matter where it led and keep on going till we came upon more traffic and so on. Thus a journey headed in the general direction of say Cornwall would invariably end up in North Wales, or even Norwich, and vice versa, with the added benefit of travelling through countless off the beaten track villages via scenery and whole remote regions we would otherwise miss completely, and hardly ever a traffic jam to get snared by. The sights, experiences, education and adventures I’ve had the good fortune to be party to across Europe over the years by heading off piste to the hills, backwaters and narrow alleyways, let alone some of the characters and hidden eateries you stumble into along your journeys are both priceless and immeasurable. The fact that most of the travelling holiday masses generally like to head straight for like masses of other travellers and not stray too far from the fort (or the English menus) once they’ve landed is just fine by me. Nothing scarier than the approaching sound of a loud group of east coast American tourists all trying to out loud each other at the same time up some remote narrow stone street in an otherwise beautiful, sleepy hilltop village in Tuscany. Definitely time to vault over the nearest wall.

    Observe the masses and do the opposite. It’s always worked for me anyway.

    Say “Hi!” to the parrots and the piglets for me. Talking of which, I’ve just had an idea for tonight’s dinner…

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    1. Red letter day! You're back from the jungle!
      I had a little skip when I saw your moniker in the comments page!

      I agree whole heartedly.....off the beaten track for me too.
      I reckon I'd only be able to visit somewhere like Florence after midnight in mid winter with a flashlight...

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  14. A marvellous post, Fly. Janice has said it all for me. :-) Your super description of driving the country roads of La France Profonde is what it's like for us every time we go anywhere from our house here. We're totally off the heavily-beaten tourist track (thank goodness) but those who do venture into our area find that they really love the peace and the space and the quiet gentleness of it all.

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    1. Ticking off the sites 'visited' in the company of hordes of others has never appealed to me....and I wonder how many of those who claim to 'love France' ever venture into areas like yours.
      I was e amiling a friend and we reckoned we could come up with a sort of guide for the areas we knew which would keep visitors busy for a fortnight without ever going near a chateau.

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