Chalk and Cheese

Now she could hear the roar of the ancient sea beneath her, its voice trapped in the millions of tiny shells that made up the Chalk.

Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd’s Crown

Despite the good supper last night, we had eschewed the hotel breakfast for a coffee in the square and a pastry from the Boulangerie. Our mouths already salivating at the thought of the caffeine, we cheerfully hailed a cyclist getting his mountain bike out of the back of his car (one of many we would see today), and a gentleman with an enormous shopping bag full of freshly-picked wild garlic leaves. So it was a shock to discover the café closed (even though the closing day was supposed to be Wednesday) and even more of a horrid shock that the boulangerie also had its metal blinds firmly down. However, most fortunately, outside the village shop was parked a little white van with its back doors open, and trays of fresh bread and mouthwatering pastries nestling inside.

So we climbed the hill out of Tournehem uncaffeinated but croissanted, and Monsieur was carrying the wherewithal to fashion us a baguette lunch later.

Ahead of us up the hill was another walker carrying an enormous rucksack. They must have set out from Canterbury a day earlier than us, and we had met up with them by combining two stages yesterday.  They were clipping along at a fair pace so we couldn’t catch them up, so for now Stephen and I just appreciated each other’s company, that of the song thrushes and blackbirds in the woods next to us, and the lapwings squeaking over the fields.

We passed a tractor chopping a field of what looked like a mixed cover crop, and this prompted Stephen to entertain me with stories of how he had first learnt to drive a tractor. He had been 18, and legally allowed to drive a tractor with a trailer with L-plates on the public highways, with no license and without anyone else in the cab. After a half-hour lesson in a field with the farmer’s son he was let loose on serious jobs, and spent four years’ worth of summer holidays working on the farm, driving seven-tonne grain trailers next to a combine harvester, manoeuvering tractors down narrow Cornish lanes, and spinning hay drying in fields.

The going was a mixture of field paths and tarmac roads, so we could make a fair amount of way. We were going so steadily, in fact, that I didn’t think in time to bend down to pick up the few adventurous worms who were squirming across the tarmac and move them to the safety of the earth. I felt bad about that as soon as I had passed them. But most of the field paths were rock-hard chalk, very white in places. Walking on the lithified remains of billions of microscopic sea creatures from millions of years ago felt like being back on the chalk of the South Downs in England.

Now we followed the guidebook instruction to ‘climb up the ridge and cross over the A26/E15 Autoroute des Anglais, which if you were a car would carry you between Calais and Reims in under three hours. To get there in 19 days on foot, continue straight’…

We followed the chalk path des Anglais.

Many field entrances were obscured by humongous heaps of dung ready to be spread on the ploughed fields, and the sides of the road were scattered with little white pellets of nitrogen fertiliser that had blown off the fields. We passed a huge chalk quarry in the distance, shadowy grey before the sun had got on it. Up at the top of the hill, I climbed a bank off the road and took a better photograph of the whole quarry from above. It was vast.

We caught up with the other pilgrim, Regine, from Belgium, who was also going to stay at the Abbey in Wisques tonight. We persuaded her not to take an advertised shortcut ahead, because otherwise she would be missing out the thrill of the day, a tiny little bit of Roman Road, called the Vie Leuline (for reasons unknown although it must be connected with the nearby village of Leulinghem).  We followed a lady in professional-looking exercise gear moving very fast out of the village on her Roman constitutional, feeling as though we were walking in the hob-nailed sandalled footsteps of Caesar himself. ‘He would’ve been riding a horse,’ said Stephen.

We didn’t see any Roman cobbles, but it was a very straight road, and I imagined the army marching north down the hill in the opposite direction to conquer Britain, and then coming back up again with their tails temporarily between their legs, like soldiers from Asterix. I picked up something that I thought looked like a piece of pottery of the ground (a Roman find!) but it turned out to be an incredibly heavy piece of iron plate. Later on I found another: something broken off a piece of farm machinery? Or a piece of World War II shrapnel?

We agreed that the huge open, monoculture fields made it very hard for wildlife to scratch a living.  In terms of wildlife today we are still seeing peacock, brimstone and white butterflies regularly, and in one field Stephen spotted four small deer. As we came into one wood we were shouted at by rooks and dunnocks (which punch above their weight in terms of their singing, for sure), and in the dust for one whole field length along the side of the road into the hamlet of Cormettes the footprints of birds accompanied us.  Pecking for ants?

We were actively looking for a place to sit down by now, having gone 16km at a fair old lick without a break, but it seemed that the inhabitants of the village of Cormettes just didn’t like to congregate and didn’t therefore see the need to sit down in the open air under a tree to chew the fat.

On the way out of the hamlet, rather feeling the ‘undulating’ character of the landscape that the guidebook had mentioned, I spotted a hare ducking into the shelter of an oilseed rape field, and two partridge flew whirring over our heads. Spotting these kinds of things got us through to the next settlement, Audenthun, where the guidebook mentioned there was a boulangerie. 

It was 12.00 when we came to the village — a community which signalled its friendliness with the best Via Francigena sign we have seen so far.

and blow me down if there wasn’t a gorgeous lawn outside the Boulangerie with trees to rest one’s back against while one tucked into a colossal baguette with huge slabs of local cheese and salami. It was absolutely idyllic.

At 12.30 a man parked up and sprinted past us into the boulangerie, so we followed him, anxious not to have it locked up in our faces.

The plan had been to get two mini pastries but all the pastries just looked so good, and we had to have the framboise tart because it was fruit, and we had to have the other thing because it was local.

The atmosphere in the bakery was really cheery, and when she heard we were walking the Francigena the lady behind the counter offered us the stamp for the credential. It was the stamp from the church in the previous village which had closed, and the stamp had come to the bakery instead. Their bread looked delicious, although we sadly had no need of any,

and it’s all baked in their ferocious-looking wood-fired oven.

We sat for a whole hour altogether — an almost unheard of occurrence.  But I think it did us good — we took to the road again, and because the little villages here are so close together, we soon came to Leulinghem, an ancient settlement and the site where Richard II of England and Charles VI of France met to sign the truce which would put a temporary halt to the Hundred Years War for 13 years.

Sadly, the modern-day inhabitants are not so peaceful: as we stood in the shade of the beautiful 12th century church of St Maurice we could hear horrible squabbling coming from a neighbouring house. But we had caught up with Regine, our fellow pilgrim, who was sitting in the bus stop by the church, and we had a little more time to chat.

I walked around the church, although it was closed, and loved the 800-year-old white stone construction, in some places with carving scratched in to the surface.

All the churches around here have patterned stained glass windows, and although the windows of the church of Saint Maurice were mostly clear glass, the windows in the chancel had deep blue crosses amongst their patterns.

Amongst the graves were three WW2 graves of three men who died when their Lancaster bomber, out on a 617 Dambuster Squadron raid, set out to drop a 6 metre-long Tallboy bomb on the German V-bomb launch site at Wizernes, not too far on from here and similar to the one in the wood that we walked past yesterday. Two of the men were British, the 26-yr old pilot John Edwards and the 22 yr-old Gunner, Sam Isherwood.  The other casualty was Tom Price, of the Royal Canadian Air Force, out on his first mission with this crew. Three of the crew survived and were captured by the Germans, later rescued by a local member of the Resistance, André Schamp, who later had the bodies of those crew who died buried here, and in St Omer.

The Tallboy bomb was incredible. According to Wikipedia ‘It made a crater 80 ft (24 m) deep and 100 ft (30 m) across and could go through 16 ft (4.9 m) of concrete.’ I  have a hard time imagining such distruction, walking through such a landscape, with such big skies and wide open spaces.

We were hardly any distance now from the two ancient Abbey communities at Wisques, and arrived with some relief at the doors of the Abbey de Notre Dame where the Benedictine sisters live their enclosed but busy lives.

The sister hospitallier, Soeur Lucie, was at Nones when we arrived, but we were invited to sit in the Chapel and wait.

The sisters were conducting their service in Gregorian chant and I stayed quietly just inside the door (while Stephen sat outside), grateful for the peace and the coolness of the stone building, and the replacement of the rhythm of walking with the rhythm of the chant. After a while Regine arrived, and we had the opportunity to get to know each other a little better.

After Nones Sister Lucie took us all to the little guesthouse of Saint Charles, where we were greeted by Farouque the dog and a cheerful handyman doing a number of mysterious jobs — and it is in these situations where I really would like to speak much better French because I would have so liked to have had a proper conversation with both him and sister Lucie.  I did gather though that she had been at the convent for 60 years, before that she had travelled to Italy to study Italian and had watched the Olympics in Rome.

Regine speaks impeccable English, though, so we have been able to exchange our stories. She is at the point I was a couple of years ago, having stepped away from her job, and is taking some time out. She has chosen the same method as me, long distance solo walking, to accomplish her recovery and rethink.

After some time resting and washing the dust from our feet we went up to the Abbey for supper. The nuns are an enclosed order, except for a couple like sister Lucie who engage with those in the outside world. So we three guests ate a simple meal (with wine!) in a private refectory. We found the room in the non-enclosed parts of the Abbey where the washing up was done and cleared up after ourselves, and just fell in love with the use to which the nuns had put the red wax from the Baby Bell cheeses!—

I went to Compline afterwards, sitting with one other non-enclosed visitor, with the nuns out of sight behind a grill, and following along with the chanted offices, in Latin.

Coming out into the air the peace stayed with me, and I walked back to the St Charles guest house with the roosting birds singing their own Compljne: nuthatch, robin, jackdaw, chaffinch, sparrow, blue tit.

Tomorrow we assay the coffee machine for breakfast…

I realised that I hadn’t been putting the walk statistics for the day at the bottom of the blogs. I am going back to correct that now.

Stats for the Day

Distance walked: 21.91km

Climb: 424m

Unidentified egg: 1