Best Day So Far

Lovely day, lovely day, lovely day, lovely day…

Bill Withers

We had an extremely relaxing rest day yesterday, in which we made full use of the washing machine to descuzz our stuff, lazily watching it dry it in the sun and wind in the garden

The archaeological museum was sadly closed but we did make another trip to the Carrefour supermarket, where we appreciated the entire fridge full of local cheeses, arranged following an ordering principle of coastal geography. On the way back we peered through the double wooden gates all down the street through which farmyards are visible (next door to the gîte is a garage selling John Deer tractors, and further down the road is a place which will mend or sell you a lawnmower). We took note also of our host Alain’s 16thc house on the way, partly built of stone from the razed cathedral.

That was it for the outings: we spent the rest of the day moving between the caldarium that was the garden and the frigidarium that was the house, watching the lizards on the wall in the former, and the bees on the pear blossom.

We started planning the stages and the accommodation for the week after Stephen leaves me and splitting a huge 40km day which I judge to be impossible. After a while my phone heated up in the sun — it had had enough.

Speaking of 40km, Matt arrived in the gîte. He’d walked a monstrous 40km from Tournehem today and actually fallen down a manhole half way along. He’d ended up with one leg thigh deep in the hole and had cuts and bruises. Horrific!

A rather nicer tale from the path was provided by Alain, who had swung by to welcome Matt and two travellers from New Zealand, Bryce and Kate. Two young Koreans had walked from Canterbury to Rome for their honeymoon, he told us, and sent him a beautiful printed book in Korean with masses of photographs of their epic trip. By the time they got to Rome, she had discovered she was pregnant! Alain is convinced their baby was conceived here. When their little daughter arrived, they called her Via.

This morning we enjoyed a breakfast of champions: locally-made sourdough bread with guacamole, tomatoes and a fried egg, and local vanilla yoghurt with fruit compote. That’s walking food for you. Matt came in and was surprised we hadn’t left at 7:30… The reason being firstly that we had both had a very bad night, hence we slept in a bit, and secondly that we only had 18 km to go today, and there was no reason to push it. I missed taking a photo of Matt with his leg up resting on a chair under the breakfast table. Then I noticed it was not the leg he’d injured. ‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘That one’s my hip replacement leg.’

I didn’t get a nice enough photograph of the three walkers to post it here (I am SURE we will meet again as were all headed in the same direction), but here is Alain, incomparable host of Via Francigena pilgrims:

The whole day was an absolute joy from first till last. Well.  Except for the fact that Stephen‘s water bladder had sprung a leak and had been slowly dripping into the bottom of his rucksack all night. We decided to pack it in the side pocket leak side up, that we would both use my water for the day, and top it up with his if necessary. As it turned out it was such a light walking day that we didn’t really feel we needed very much.

As you know, most of the fields we have seen so far have been wheat, but a couple of days ago we did see one field of flax, and today we saw our first potato field, planted up in soil that was noticeably brown rather than grey or white. In a walker’s fever dream Stephen thought the potato furrows looked like fingers of Kitcat. I was more interested in the herringbone pattern visible in the cracked dry earth on the sides of the furrows: four sloping one way, then four sloping the other and so on. A set of deer hoofprints bisected them.

It was definitely a Sunday: we were sharing the gravel road over the Big Ag wheat fields with recreational cyclists, and a determined mother out running with her dog on a lead and her two little girls on their bikes in front of her, one with her two front teeth endearingly missing. We were taking some time to get back into the technique of walking these gravel paths, which require a quite unexpectedly high level of concentration: feet are constantly slightly off balance which puts pressure on ankles and toes, which can lead to pressure and blisters. In the normal run of things, I don’t think one would even spare a second thought for a road like this, but when you are walking all day, it does become a different kettle of gravel.

Swallows dived over one house as we passed. i thought their migration was extraordinary, but last night Bryce told us about the godwits which arrive in New Zealand all the way from Siberia! We had some absolutely lovely chats with them all last night. One of the many interesting cultural surprises is that what one considers to be general knowledge turns out not to be so general, but rather very geographically particular. For example, Kate had a beautiful carved necklace made out of the precious green stone called pounamou local to New Zealand and sacred to the Māoris Part of her culture which I had never heard about it until I went to New Zealand. And Stephen was explaining stone age use of flint to Bryce.

Liettres was billed in the guidebook as the main point of interest of the day. It certainly had the best and most enticing collection of signs ever, with our introduction to the village being the our first sign for a cave — a vineyard and brewery (fortunately closed because it was a Sunday, otherwise we might not have gotten much further).

We were sad not to be making a left turn following the sign to the ‘party room’ (salle des fêtes), but did turn down the allée du criquet, laughing that this must be a bowling alley. An interpretation board revealed that in fact it actually was: Liettres has a claim to be the birthplace of cricket, or at least the earliest documented mention, in a letter of complaint from 1478 about an argument during a game. “Cultural appropriation,“ muttered my cricket expert.

Then came our first stunning view of a French château, basking in the sun with cherry blossom and a row of trees to set it off perfectly. According to the guidebook it is ruined, so a great opportunity for a fixer-upper. We started to make plans.

Two steps along the road, Stephen was attracted by some beautiful horned Charolet cows in a barn,

and while I was talking to Ludovic in his Sunday best (who told me the chateau was disappointingly happily inhabited) Stephen was just inside the barn talking enthusiastically to Ludovic’s wife Aline, the daughter of Monsieur Gotrand the farmer, about the most beautiful sight of the trip so far which literally made me gasp: shafts of sunlight streaming into the barn illuminating hay bales and a perfect line of Charolet and Aquitaine bulls. They were beautiful and gentle creatures (and behind the bars of their troughs!), snuffling at us and licking each other.

Ludovic and Aline — thank you for talking to us!

Delight followed on from delight, with the farm’s extensive vending machine which took up a whole wall of one farm building, in which you could buy the entirety of the farm’s edible produce (apart from beef): You could get eggs, garlic, haricot beans, apple juice, sausages, chicory, celeriac, leeks, carrots and onions, potato chips produced on the farm, and huge bags of potatoes and apples.

The Sunday holiday atmosphere continued: there were motorcycle clubs riding out, and a group of three lovely ladies on their horses: a beautiful grey with a plaited mane whose Greek name I have entirely forgotten, followed by Furioso, and then Ginka.

There were also absolute idiots on the road, like the three young men in their souped-up VW Golf GTI’s, one of whom had the passenger door open and his foot sticking out the open window.

The landscape after Liettres was one of transition away from the enormous arable fields to a mixed farming system with small-scale pastureland and fields, and houses with interesting brick detailing, and freezes of patterned ceramic tiles. This was Transvaal.

We encountered the first slag heap, a terril, which means that we are (temporarily, I think) moving out of the chalk and flint geology to a UNESCO world heritage site: the cultural landscape of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais Mining Basin.  It is a coal seam 120km long and only 12km wide, with the Belgian border on one side and the Artois hills on the other. The terril was almost perfectly conical, greening up with seeds blown in on the wind over the years — but also, as an information board told us, invasive species such as Cape groundsel from Sweden and even plants native to Australia. It is theorised that the seeds might have arrived via the sheep wool trade, or even on the boots and kit of Commonwealth troops stationed here during the world wars of the 20th century.

In a highly populated industrial and agricultural area, the slag heaps offer a kind of biodiversity refuge, with very particular conditions created on slopes that have avoided contamination with industrial or agricultural chemicals. The poor soil and temperatures roughly 5° higher than the surrounding fields creates conditions which support important communities of rare insects and reptiles.

A straight path on the map turned out to be a beautiful tunnel of trees with soft grass, and butterflies using the warm sunny ground as a place to display. We saw our first orange tips.

‘I think this must be an old railway to serve the mine,’ said my industrial heritage expert — and indeed, when we exited the long tunnel we came to another terril that has been made into a kind of regenerated mini country park for the benefit of those walking the Via Francigena, I read, and wildlife corridor at the entrance of which was a coal trolley.

The country park had some well-placed picnic benches, so we sat down on one for a much-needed 16km lunch break.

Stephen went up to the top of the terril to the viewing area, from which he got a most wonderful view.

I am ashamed to say that I was simply content to look at the photographs he took.

This was just shaping up to be the most beautiful day. We hadn’t got far to go now, and I pretty much just floated through the early afternoon soaking it all up.

Auchy-le-Bois signalled itself as a pilgrim-friendly hamlet.

I climbed the steps to the church, hoping that it would be open, so that I could appreciate beautiful stained glass from the inside. Sadly, I couldn’t,

but the exterior also had its micro moments of colour

and quirky interest.

On the far side of the church in the graveyard was a poignant row of graves: the entire crew of a single plane shot down on the 27th of August, 1943. One grave particularly tugged at my heartstrings: that of Flight Sergeant TK Jones, navigator and bomber. That he had been Welsh was made clear by an inscription in Cymraig at the bottom of his headstone. He had been the ‘beloved only son of Rose and Howard Jones’ and they wished he would ‘sleep until we see each other again’.

I felt quite choked as we climbed the hill out of the village. I looked him up on the internet later: he had come from Rhostyllen, then a mining village in the borough of Wrexham.  I shall think of him now every time I drive past Wrexham on my way to my brother’s on Anglesey. The 23-year-old from a mining village who died over the skies of another.

The spire of Amettes church was now visible over the fields.

It is another one of these agricultural villages we’ve seen so many of, this time with a little stream running through the middle of it, and small-scale farmyards on the main road accessed by crossing over little drawbridge-like bridges.

The final delight of the day came in the form of the pilgrim hostel we were to stay in: La Ferme des Deux Tilleuls.  I was looking out for lime trees, and when we came to them, they were impossible to miss.

We let ourselves in the farmyard gates and I gave the second gasp of the day:

A more beautiful courtyard you couldn’t imagine, with lovely old beams, flowerbeds with grape hyacinth echoing the bright blue painted doors and shutters, a bench in the sun for weary pilgrims, and, extraordinarily, a loft full of racing pigeons!

They softly cooed at us as my hair and Stephen’s sleeping bag dried in the sun and he effected running repairs to his slightly perforated drybags.

A perfect day.

Stats for the Day

Distance: 19.98km

Climb: 239m

Time: 4hr 22mins

Today’s Harry Potter moment: