Of the Strategic Importance of Good Food

In war, a soldier is most in need of full belly and a good pair of shoes

Attributed, fairly apocryphally, to Napoleon Bonaparte

Supper last night had been the most incredible delight: home-made leek soup followed by roast chicken and vegetables, full of herbs and flavour. Not one but two puddings! Buttermilk rice pudding and apple tart. A fusion of France and Belgium, if ever there was one. This morning‘s breakfast was equally generous, with Micheline‘s home-made soda bread, her cousin’s apple juice, home-made plum jam and fresh bread from the bakery, not to mention wonderful coffee. Paul stamped my credential, and we somehow managed to tear ourselves away from these two kind people who made us feel so at home in a foreign land. As Stephen said, hospitable people, in the widest and best senses of the word. They waved us off with slices of last night’s apple tart in the rusack: ‘Two for the road!’ said Micheline.

It had been a chilly 2°C when we had woken up and although the sun was shining, there was a sharp wind blowing as we set off uphill into the hazy sunshine to rejoin the Via Francigena.

The larks were rising with the sun as we climbed nearly one hundred metres straight out of the box, but we were marvelling at how energetic we felt, and how well our bodies and especially our feet and knees were feeling. One reason we were walking so fast was to heat up: fingers were cold (hat and gloves buried securely right at the bottom of my pack, unfortunately), and my ear inner tubes (or is that bicycles?) were making their presence known in the cold wind.

Many of the place names around here, for example the ones on the signposts in the above photograph, sound not remotely French, and that is because we are in French Flanders. Belgian Micheline had discussed the history of the Flemish in the area with us over breakfast, and she told us amongst other things that the ‘hen’ ending to many of these villages means ‘home’.

The early morning business of the French countryside was well under way, tractors pulling their clanking machinery across the vast fields, and two lapwings startling me with their unmistakeable mating calls — loud squeakings, exactly like dog toys.  More melodiously, thrushes and wrens were making aural division of the little copses of woodlands as we passed.

Speaking of woodland, my munitions expert enthusiastically told me that one of the woods hearabouts was a location from which V3 rockets were to be fired at London. ‘At London?’ I queried. But that was miles away! Apparently the Germans hid their firing ramps in woods, and indeed, the V1, V2 and the little-used V3 rockets were all capable of striking London from way over here. Many ramps were hidden partially underground, but they needed chimney pipes to extract the smoke and gases from the underground chambers, and specialist RAF Mosquito light aircraft would dart behind enemy lines to photograph the landscape at particular times of day, providing pictures for analysts to pore over to try to identify the location of the exhaust pipes from the shadows on the ground. 

The history lesson was really interesting, and made the kilometres fly by, so it was a real shame that the visitor centre in the wood doesn’t open until later in April. It would certainly have been worth a detour.

We came to the first sizeable town, signalled from a way away by the steady puffing chimneys of a magnesium plant, and by crowing cockerels. The cockerels seem to be an indication of the micro-agriculture being practised throughout the villages and small towns in the area, because they were such a feature of the morning.

‘Ooo “Caffiers!” I said. ‘They’ll have good coffee’.  ‘Pas du tout’, said my expert (having read the guidebook). ‘It’s from the old Saxon words catt and fyers — ‘fierce cat’, or ‘wildcat’. And indeed, in the part of the village we walked through, there were no cafés, although that mattered not because we had our two-for-the-road slices of apple tart to look forward to.

We didn’t see any wildcats either, nor cats of any kind… as I have just remembered, they were all on holiday on the beach at Wissant: when we were walking back to the car yesterday evening after having admired the extraordinary sunset, a white cat shot across our path onto the huge boulders which are the French coast’s ubiquitous sea defences. When I went to photograph it amongst the rocks, I saw there were actually two of them. The white cat ducked behind a rock, but the black-and-white one didn’t mind being watched as it, too, apparently appreciated the sight of the sun going down behind the sea.

It was out of Fierce Cat Town then, and into the land of Big Ag and Power Transmission. Enormous double pairs of pylons strode across giant fields of wheat, making determinedly for Calais on the horizon, now a mere 8km from us as our route turned back on itself today.

How efficient are these mega-fields at producing the wheat to make the bread of France — and how inimical to wildlife.  Tractors trundled up and down the fields with spraying equipment — one driver courteously stopping as he came to the end of the field nearest our track, so as not to let the wind carry the spray onto us. Heaven knows how much of the spray the seagulls were ingesting, though, with their worms.

However enjoyably rapid and easy to walk the tracks over the farmland were, we were both glad when the route disappeared into the shade and shelter from the wind of the Bois du Mont, the Forêt Demoniale de Guînes. The actual route went a kilometre on a road and then did a hairpin turn back into the forest, but I took a punt on some paths that ducked sooner into the woods, that I could also triangulate with paths criss-crossing on the map.

We had abandoned AllTrails today in favour of IGNRando, the French equivalent of Ordnance Survey. The level of topographical detail is so much more effective, and this instance in comparison with the experience of trying to make our way using AllTrails to Audembert yesterday just convinced us to ditch the latter. I even think (for you readers planning to undertake this pilgrimage) that the ‘stage’ presentation of the AllTrails download is unhelpful, because you can’t see where you’re going beyond that day, in order to adjust your route. For example, in coming out of Wissant yesterday we had to transition from the day three stage to the day four stage, and scrolling through 100-something stages (not in chronological order) was laborious and irritating.

Dear reader, I apologise for having left you in the forest, but I hope you appreciated the birdsong while you waited. Here there were nuthatches, blackcaps and song thrushes to join the chorus of chiffchaff, robins and wrens — the silence of the great fields was a startling, and sad comparison. Our feet now crunched over beechmast and last year’s dry leaves, and every now and then we had to step aside to let a cyclist flash past.

The path wheeze absolutely worked, and we found ourselves swiftly rejoining the Francigena on a broad track through what turned out to be plantation cultivation on a grand scale. To our left was oak woodland, the trees planted in wide rows, each tree connected by a corridor of brambles with a broad ride in between each row.

To our right, hazel was coppiced, the rides here instead carpeted with wood anemone and cowslips.

The whole forest was waking up: oak and hazel and beech, together with hornbeam and bird cherries. A lovely thing.

Once out of the forest we found ourselves on the road to Guînes. We were briefly back in the territory of gigantic open fields with no hedges, although on the opposite side of the road one had been recently planted up, and I stepped over the carriageways to photograph a blackthorn in full flower, a pleasing contrast to the chalk slope that was its backdrop, greening with this year’s new crop.

Whilst we are stepping back over the carriage way to join Stephen, I will draw your attention to the impeccable quality of French tarmac. This was something of a main road, but even the humblest back road has an unblemished road surface. We saw even saw road sign warning of a chaussé déformé, but to the Herefordshire eye it was no such thing. France has 1,053,215 km of paved roads and the UK has 424,129.  France’s population is 66,625,436 and the UK has 69,448,696, so one would have thought that our UK tax dollars could maintain our roads in a better state.

I digress.

I had had a couple of email back-and-forths with our landlady for the night to clarify the time of our arrival, which is always difficult to estimate when one is walking and has no real idea of the terrain and how long one will have to stop and rest… the answer being today, almost not at all over a total distance of almost 20 km.  We had said 2pm, but when we made it into the main square at 1.50pm Stephen drew my attention to a lady gesticulating at us. The sweet thing had actually waited for us in the square (recognising us presumably by our pilgrim garb and equipment), because, as quickly became evident, the door to our apartment was hidden behind the scaffolding of an active building site and difficult to locate.

Behind the first door was a long corridor in the building that was being renovated,

next to concrete screed being laid in a gutted room to the right,

What on earth had we rented? I was beginning to wonder whether the lady who had beckoned us over in the square and who was now leading us who knows where might suddenly turn into a colossal serpent like Nagini uncoiling from the body of Bathilda Bagshott. But the second door, led to a minuscule, though sun-drenched yard, and a third door opened from there into a lovely apartment where there were slippers to put on, a well-equipped kitchen, and a sitting room, its two windows giving a busybody’s paradise of a view over the main square.

I availed myself of the fabulous shower pressure and hot water, while Stephen availed himself of the coffee machine, and then we went back out into town to find some food.  A boulangerie-patisserie, a charcouterie and the Fresh Point mini-mart had us returning back to our P’tit Nid with armfuls of delicious things that my chef will creatively transform for us tonight into sausages braised in lentils with leeks and potatoes, tomatoes and a turnip (the latter is suspicious and I will pick it out of the stew). In the meantime we dug ravenously into a 3.45 late lunch: two huge croissants filled with jambon and white sauce, with grated cheese on top, that we heated up in the oven.

In town I managed to get the credential stamp from the receptionist at the Mairie (‘she doesn’t look like she’s planning on smiling any time this year’, said Stephen), and a tiny bottle of lavender oil from the pharmacy to replace the one I had finished last night putting on my slightly sunburned arms and face. When leaving home I had thought myself stupid to be packing sunscreen, and when I had been walking through the heat on the top of the cliffs yesterday, I had regretted putting in a down gilet.  I used both within the space of 12 hours today, so neither has had a free ride yet!

It’s been an afternoon in which I have really been able to rest. Not a rest day exactly (we walked a speedy 20km today in 4 hrs 5 mins), but one which we completed early with our feet in fine fettle, which enabled us to have a good deal of downtime. We are going to bed tonight after another lovely supper, and as Napoleon may or may not have said, what a pilgrim needs most is a good pair of shoes and a full belly.

Stats for the Day:

Distance: 19.69km

Climb: 281m