Warmth

Behold, my friends, the spring is come

Sitting Bull

It was another thank you this morning for yet another very kind host on this path. I’m constantly amazed at the number of people who are part of this network hosting pilgrims on the Via Francigena. Last night at the gîte I found in Mme Monique’s guest book the names of two pilgrims I have met who came here before me, Kate and Bryce, on the line above, and Ged, a friend of a friend who walked from Glasgow to Rome, and sat at this same table in August 2023.

On the way out of the farm Mme Monique showed me the beautiful Citroën resting dustily in the garage, partially under sheets, next to one of the tractors. It had been her late husband’s pride and joy.

I walked on in the footsteps of Kate, Bryce and Ged, taking a shortcut past an uninhabited mill (one of so very many fixer-upper opportunities in France)

to reach the Francigena again, a long straight country field path through corn and oil-seed rape and aspen plantations.

It took me a good amount of time to get my head into the game today, after a slightly chaotic evening and morning. But a meeting with Thierry and his hunting dog Sibelle put me back on the right path, so to speak. His clothing pronounced him to be a man of the land, so I asked him what he hunted: hare, was the answer, wild partridge, and roe deer, mostly. The dog had a beautiful soft mouth and was impeccably behaved. Thierry’s daughter had studied first in Maidstone and then up in Ledbury and Malvern, right next door to us! It was a small world. Why, he was almost an old friend! We agreed that it had been incredibly dry recently and he said, like madame Monique yesterday, but yes, the fields really needed the water here. They have a house in Spain and it had rained for the whole month of March out there. It’s so hard for farmers not being able to predict the weather.

After this mental reset I found I could walk the landscape with my usual focus, and could appreciate the sight of a magnificent family of a bull, his three cows and their calves (one each) from the safety of the other side of a fence.

My field track followed the Fion river to the village of Saint-Amand-sur-Fion, allegedly one of the prettiest villages in France.  It’s also one of the first on this route to exhibit the timber framed construction that will be a feature of the next few days. It’s the French analogue of the Herefordshire black-and-white villages like Pembridge and Eardisland.

On the ground I found a nest, seemingly one of this year’s, with bright green moss and new feathers packing the inside. I don’t know what bird it was that built it, and couldn’t think how it came to be lying there on the mown grass.

The main street of Sant Amand was lined with tiny champagne houses and farms, with giant wooden gates leading into working farm courtyards.  Most were beautifully tended and some had were like scaled versions of the Globe Theatre with first floor galleries.

I bought myself a roll for lunch and, since breakfast had been a bit sparse and I needed to walk nearly 23 km today, a vanilla éclair.

Apart from the picture-perfect pretty gîtes in the village,

its stand-out feature is the ancient church of St Amand which gives the village its name.

It was built by the Knights Hospitallers between 1138 and 1147, with the tower and two Romanesque doorways surviving from this time.

The rest dates from about 100 years later, constructed in white chalk in the Gothic style, oddly misproportioned in comparison to the  original building but a marvel nonetheless.

The whole place is being actively restored, with the pantile floor and altar covered with chipboard sheets. Some of the columns towards the back were dark with mould, and others were built from extraordinary red-veined limestone.

The porch is the most unusual part, built like a cloister, it is thought (given the church’s Hospitaller origins) to provide a sleeping shelter for pilgrims.  I loved the way it proved a visible 900-year old connection with the modern pilgrimage. I thought about the pilgrim bottoms which had worn away the stone of the low wall over the centuries.

I repaired to an outside bench with a view of the cloister-porch to eat my Magnificent Éclair and ask myself why anybody would eat a croissant when something so comprehensively delicious is available in every boulangerie’s adjacent cabinet.

I texted Ian to find out how he was getting on, and got the reply back that he was in his gîte down the road, getting ready to leave. It was 11am — a very slow start! — but then I had already been on the road for two hours by that time.  How unexpectedly fantastic: we could walk together to Vitry-le-Francois.

And so our conversations once more ate up the miles, this time talking about the death of our fathers and Ian’s mother.  It felt like a very strong connection.  It’s lovely walking these paths alone but also lovely having the kind of deep conversations with companions that walking long distances seems to make possible.

It’s a different kind of treasure of the landscape than the one this woman and her dog had discovered with their metal detector.  ‘It brings good luck!’ she said, holding it upside down to British eyes.  She often finds war-time waste like shrapnel in the fields. The real treasure hoard remains buried in the ground to be discovered on another day.

The route now climbed a hill which the guidebook promised would give expansive views.  On the way up was a wayside treasure I had been keeping my eyes out for since the beginning of April:  the first orchid.

The hilltop views did not disappoint.  There was Vitry, and overhead ‘enough blue sky to repair a Dutchman’s trousers’. The Dutchman sitting on the bench beside me having his lunch while I had mine was amused by the expression, and said their equivalent was ‘make a handkerchief’.

Maybe Dutchmen used to repair their trousers with handkerchiefs; but in any case we both looked out over the layered greens of the wooded slopes below us, different parts of the patchwork being lit into green gleams by the moving shafts of sunlight through the clouds.

Starting up again after our lunchbreak we almost immediately halted to talk to a vinedresser who was getting a little wheeled trolley out of a van.

Vivian was about to start pruning and training the Chardonnay vines.  His English was excellent, so we chatted for quite a while about the process. The little trolley had a box on it for his secateurs and bobbin of twine, and, given the steepness of the slope, I was glad to see it also had brakes. It takes 22 hours to do 1000 vines — and there were 4000 vines in Vivian’s area. I can’t even imagine starting such a mammoth task.  Forth Road Bridge stuff.

Down past the south-facing vineyards we walked, off Mont de la Forche and into the green wooded chalky hills we had seen from the top.

The warm slopes were the perfect habitat for lady orchids, Orchis purpurea, rising up to 30 cm from the grass. Such a thrill.

I suppose Fork Hill gets its name from the four lesser hills projecting southwards like tines. The little valleys were miniature oases, with meadows in their first flowering,

small orchards,

and impressive stacks of firewood.

The warmth of the chalky soil had brought out a slow worm to bask.  Its Dutch name is hazelworm, which I subsequently discovered is also a regional name for it in the UK.

After a death-defying crossing of the N44 we rejoined our dear old friend, the Marne Lateral Canal.

Here the canal trough had been engineered to fly impressively over what we thought was the Marne but which I saw on the map later was in fact the Saulx river, a major tributary of the Marne which it joined 250 yards to the west, swelling its waters and doubling it in size.  The Saulx, pronounced ‘So’, is a perfect example of the exasperatingly supernumerary nature of letters in French words.

The end of the walk had come upon us all at once. There was one last sight to see, behind sadly locked gates, a half-timbered chapel dedicated to St Nicholas, patron saint of sailors.

It was built in 1637 by the Marne boatmen who founded this city district of Le Bas Village, and who decorated it inside and out with anchors, and a ship’s bell,

and covered the tower covered in an intricate pattern of beech shingles, like the scales on a legendary sea monster.

And now it really was time to say goodbye to Ian.  He is meeting friends in Vitry and is planning a rest day here tomorrow, whilst I am walking on.

Into the narrow half-timbered streets of Vitry I went, past the old 19th century prison designed with conveniences modern for the time such as running water and showers for the inmates, men and woman separated on different floors. The prisoners were mostly working light sentences, but there was one public execution here in 1911, the guillotine set up on the street where I was standing, justice carried out for the murder of a young baker, Antoinette Ketter. It the prison was briefly brought back into service after the Liberation to detain former collaborators.

My AirBnB was just around the block of half timbered houses. Agnès was a warm and affectionate host, as were her cats,

and we spent the evening chatting very happily over a bottle of local champagne. With cats.

What a welcome!

Stats for the Day

Distance: 22.71 km

Time: 4 hrs 47 mins

Pace: 4.7km/h

Climb: 191m, after a few dead flat days

Bonus Processionary Moth Caterpillars, actually processing.  DO NOT TOUCH.  Ideally, I would have reported this sighting, but I had a look at the website in French and decided I couldn’t deal with it.