Off-piste

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other…

Robert Frost, ‘The Road Less Travelled’

My rest day turned out to be quite unrestful, after a successful hunt for good food and the cooking thereof, a decent night with a comfortable mattress (I had to decided to give myself a bit of a break from the blog in the evening and overnight), and plenty of stretching. My back felt much better.

In the morning, I set about finding forward accommodation. I pretty much had the coming week locked down up to my next rest day in Langres, apart from one tricky day. And the main business of today was to plan the following week, right up to Besançon, the last rest day (mirabile dictu) before Lausanne.

It was really quite unreasonably difficult. I had no Wi-Fi in the Maison du Pélérin, and 4G reception kept dipping in and out. Sometimes I had phone reception for calling and sometimes not. I made 21 phone calls in the morning and either got phone messages or couldn’t connect at all. I sent emails and got no reply. Several key accommodation providers had gone out of business or weren’t accepting pilgrims any more due to sickness or other reasons.

At times I felt quite tearful and by the time I set out for my massage at 2.45 I had not managed to find one single place.  But on my way my host for the stage but one before Langres emailed me in response to my desperate plea for advice and said that I could cut out the stage after hers completely by ignoring the Francigena route and just hacking down the Roman road for 24 km.  This I thought was an excellent suggestion and it was a very simple matter to find myself an extra night’s accommodation in Langres.  Time perhaps for some tourism as well as admin and sterilisation of clothing.

The massage really was very pointless.  I felt I needed an aggressive sports massage to really dig into the sore knots and eliminate them, but she just glided over the surface, as anodyne as the mood music playing in the background. My French was altogether inadequate to explain what I needed, so I just forced myself to relax and reasoned that if it didn’t hurt, it probably meant that all my muscles were in tip-top condition.

I had not had the time nor energy to engage with the town’s most illustrious product:  the young Napoleon studied military strategy here from 1779-84 (and came back 29 years later to take the town back from forces hostile to him who had seized it).  If you were interested and wanted to know more, I’m sorry I couldn’t muster up enthusiasm for Napoleonic memorabilia!

And the Chateau?  Turns out it is a psychiatric hospital.

Another pilgrim arrived late on in the day, and I generously returned the second blanket I had used for the first night to his room which he now used (and then woke up many times in the night, really quite chilly).

Pascal was the second Belgian mathematician I have met doing a pilgrimage. I don’t know how statistically likely this is, but I am sure one of them would have been delighted to tell me if I had thought to ask. Pascal is going to Compostela, not Rome, and he had an enormous scallop shell attached to his even more enormous pack. It weighed 15kg, he told me. I couldn’t even move it. I think his route is very much less well serviced than mine, so he needs to be entirely self-sufficient. Where there is no accommodation, he has been sleeping in cemeteries. I think I would find this a very disquieting experience, although Pascal said he found himself in good company with the other ‘sleepers’.

I shouldered my 8.5kg rucksack, and set off half an hour after him through the sleepy streets of the town, feeling well rested.

Most of the roads in Brienne are named after generals, and the presence of Napoleon is felt everywhere, from the Napoleon Pharmacie (battlefield wound dressings, anyone?) to the Hôtel de Ville before which a statue of the young studious Bonapart stood.

To join the path I walked around the edge of the Château, thinking of the distressed patients hidden behind its high walls, and hoping they would find peace in its quiet grandeur.

And then it was out into fields, where I met two women out on a sporty constitutional to the next town. They were very firmly of the opinion that they could never walk as far as Rome. But they looked pretty strong walkers to me.

We all crossed the river Aube by the Old Brienne road bridge, which had formed a part of the plan for Napoleon’s army to retreat to Troyes on 1st February 1814 — he deployed cavalry and horse-drawn cannon, to cover his army’s retreat across the bridge at 2am, and then to destroy the bridge an hour later.

The women turned down a path through the woods that was not the one that the Francigena took, but which, on a whim, I decided to follow. I could see it joined up with the Francigena in the end. It turned out to be an excellent path, with interpretation boards along its length.

And thus I learnt that this was an alluvial forest, permanently damp (to which the Veronica beccabunga in the permanent puddles on the path would attest).  And learned that 200 years after the drums of Napoleon’s army  would surely have been heard throughout these woods, now the only drumming would be the four different kinds of woodpeckers that inhabit them, drilling tree bark to get at the insects inside.

I heard one greater spotted woodpecker, but more numerous were golden orioles, calling to each other across an extraordinary wildflower meadow.

The two walkers, deep in conversation, had walked right through it (too familiar to them, perhaps, to be much of interest), and three female runners who jogged past me also seemed unimpressed. But the meadow, a woodland clearing, was a wonder, filled with the seed heads of pasque flowers, which must have been a sight to see in flower on Easter Day. There were a few dewy flowers still left for me to admire.

I lost count of the species. There were three different kinds of orchids. This one was a military orchid, appropriately enough,

I don’t know what the others were.

Here the cicadas created their penetrating clicking hum.  I have been hearing them for a couple of days now in the grasses, and they were so loud that at first I thought they must be ground nesting birds before I recognised them for what they were.  A pair of mistle thrushes squabbled in a hazel thicket.  Overlaying all was the liquid drops of the golden orioles’ falling phrases, as they called to each other from the trees surrounding the clearing.

I don’t know what I would have seen had I taken the other path, but if this is what it meant to go off-piste, I was sold. My day was completely made.

I excitedly told the first person I saw about it, an older gentleman going for a little walk as I came into Dienville, who engaged me in a conversation when he saw me taking a photograph of the French equivalent of Frog Lane and wanted to know why.

He was doubtful that I had heard a golden oriole, and tried to persuade me that it might’ve been a green woodpecker. He also said that Napoleon had been very unfairly treated as a despot by history.  I made suitably non committal French noises in response.

If Brienne seemed a bit down on its luck then Dienville had all the money. It was picture perfect, with a beautiful crossing of the Aube river.

Military references seem to be everywhere today: The shape of the church’s spire resembled a Prussian helmet, with chattering martins building nests under its brim. Attila the Hun had passed this way with his army in 451.

As I was taking a photograph of what I thought must be the old market, a voice called out my name. When I turned a woman I had never seen before said ‘I’m Isabelle!’ There was a brief bit of confusion when I thought she meant the Isabelle who was going to be my Airbnb host for this evening, but in fact, she was the Isabelle with whom I had spoken the day before yesterday and who had effectively been my host for the last couple of days, as she is part of the fraternal pilgrims association which provided the little flat I stayed in in Brienne. It was amazing to meet her! An extraordinary coincidence.

I sat a little while on a stone bench in the shade to catch up on messages. I intended there to be lots of these little rest points during the day because today’s Airbnb is another of those 5pm entry times, which means that I will have to be out in the heat of the day whether I like it or not.

But there were lovely things to look at here in this pretty, very French, town.

I had planned to go off piste again (to cut down a 29km day to something more like 24) after today’s third crossing of the Aube river,

and at the point of decision, by extraordinary coincidence, there was a signpost indicating ‘The Other World’.  That was it: it was fate.

L’Autre Monde was a tiny hamlet of a couple of houses, populated with two horses and little else,

But the road through it was as shady as the map had indicated, and compared very favourably with the exposed loop through fields that the official route was taking. I kept an eye on the verges and appreciated the light filtering through the backdrop of silver birch, a tree I have not seen much of here so far.

I thought that I might see some more orchids on the roadside today.I did see my first damselfly: a bronze-winged peacock blue-bodied immature male beautiful demoiselle. It flew off before I could photograph it.

I had then intended to take the canal path, but I discovered here was no access to what was in fact a very industrial canal, completely different from the ones I had walked on up to now. Martins were building nests under the bridge. It was a shame I couldn’t get down to it.

But there was a white gravel road that would do very well instead, with a decent amount of shade. I set off along it, feeling as though this might have been the sort of path that my father and Stephen’s father and their friend Brother Peter would have walked, 70 years ago during their summer walking holidays in France. I found I was loving choosing my own path for a day, studying the map and selecting gravel back roads like this to get me to Jaucourt by the shortest, shadiest route.  À la Robert Frost in ‘The Road Not Taken’ I wondered what sights I was missing and would never see, but was also enjoying my own chosen path unfolding itself in front of me.

It was down this off-piste road that I had the next thrill of the day: a tiger swallowtail butterfly with unmistakable tiger stripes on its upper wings, and blue arches on its swallowtails. I couldn’t get close enough to get a brilliant photograph of it, but I could hear the calls on the family group chat: “photo, or it didn’t happen“.  So I tried.

Parts of the road were lined with hawthorn busy with humming bees weighed down with full sacs of pollen. I had waves of the lovely fragrance as I passed.

Other sections where the trees closed over my head gave me cool shade.

I kept looking in the verges for orchids, and I was rewarded in a wildflower meadow on the edge of Jessains, a village which had covenanted not to use pesticides. I don’t know what the orchid is, but it’s going to be absolutely huge.

It was nearly 1.00 and apart from a single early sit-down back in Dienville, I’d been walking for hours. It was getting pretty hot. Jessains had obligingly left the church open for overheated pilgrims to sit in and cool down for a while. Several of them, also off piste, had recorded their names and thanks in the visitors book.

The cold stone floors and thick plaster walls had effectively kept the heat at bay, so I picked a pew at the back, took my rucksack off and just sat for half an hour, my body temperature slowly dropping down to a comfortable level. I hadn’t really got anything for lunch as such (there are no sources of food after Dienville along the length of the route today, either mine or the official one), but I had a crunchy bar and some nuts and some water.

I emerged back out into the sun to hack along the road for another few kilometres, peacefully listening to an audiobook. In order to rejoin the Via Francigena I had to climb quite a hill, but at least it was shady,

with an orchid or two to provide interest.

And this was good because when the wood ended, it was just more agricultural fields with the sun beating down.

Then away in the distance above the crops rose a gigantic Ferris wheel, slowly turning, with a rollercoaster twisting its heart-stopping away around the Nigloland theme park. This was not a surprise, because I knew it was coming, but it was still an incongruous sight against the background of wooded hills.

After a couple of days walking through the wet and dry Champagne areas with no viticulture, there were a few fields here on suitable slopes planted up with vines. And there was one of those high clearance tractors in action. Unlike the giant potato tractors this one was highly manoeuverable, its small wheels giving it a tight turning circle to position itself with precision at the head of the rows.

I was now at the village of Dolancourt, 2.5km away from my day’s end at Jaucourt, with a couple of hours to spare. In the village’s tiny main square, here with a Mairie that was little more than a private house, there were shady trees that mercifully hadn’t been pollarded this year, with benches underneath.

I picked a stone bench and thankfully took off my rucksack. It is fitting quite well these days, and wasn’t too heavy because I had almost run out of water.  But it is very hot against my back. I felt pretty exerted, not that there was any difficulty with the walk (for days the route has been almost flat, something that will change radically in the coming days), just because of the heat. Very different to the rested, Austen version of myself who’d set out this morning in freshly laundered clothes!

I took off my shoes and settled myself down for a proper break. Martins were chittering overhead but the soundscape here was provided by Nigloland: coordinated screaming and shrieking from the theme park revellers as the rides dropped from great heights or plunged down the steep, twisting rollercoaster slopes.  What a thing for the villagers to live with. The nervy cats don’t seem to like it much. They were all on edge.

Finally it was time to leave, for a short road walk to my destination, past an old mill and communal covered washing areas on the Landion river as it neared the head of the valley it had created over the millennia, just before it joins its waters with those of the grander Aube.

I would have loved to have been able to soak my feet in it for a while.

But I had an appointment in Jaucourt, where I could see as I turned in the gate that there was going to be some very high quality R&R!

Stats for the Day

Distance: 25.22 (an hour’s walking saved by going off-piste

Time: 5 hrs 12 moving time over nine hours

Pace: the usual

Number of unidentified orchids: loads. have at it, Zand and Gilbo!