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.