Cuckoo

You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.

Robin Williams

Dominique and Dominic have been welcoming pilgrims into the little flat in their courtyard since 2017. And they have been fostering a long time before that: their current family includes 14-year-old Jordain to whom they they have been foster parents for the last 13 years. We all chatted together over a delicious supper consisting of quiche and olive and onion salad, braised chicken and potatoes, and chocolate gâteau with fresh strawberries and cream. Mr Dominique’s contribution to the meal was a bowl of veal tripe, which I cautiously tried.

I’ve been waking up every couple of hours in the night recently, and last night was no different. I was mainly worrying about not being able to walk with my very blistered little toe and I had pretty much decided that I would take it to a pharmacy this morning and see what they had to say. However, after a cup of coffee I decided that what it needed was lancing, so I prepared my surgical tools and had a go. Wrapping the post-operative digit in Compeed seemed to work admirably, and I was surprised and relieved to find that I was walking almost normally.

Mrs. Dominique stamped my credential and we had a brief chat at her conservatory table to put the world to rights before I set off, well fed Chez les DomDoms and ready for the penultimate day before Besançon.

I had not got very far along the road when an older man called over to me and asked if I’d like to take a nice photo. He disappeared briefly into his shed,

and came out holding a huge cockerel, Coucou, which he had trained to stand theatrically on his hat.

Jeanjean (Claude) Hezard was quite adorably cuckoo. When he found out I was British he told me he’d worked in Cardiff as a merchant seaman transporting coal from the Welsh mines. We somehow ended up talking about how the Americans had liberated this town after the Germans had burnt the surrounding area to punish the Resistance operating here. It was difficult to gauge his age, and I wasn’t quite sure whether he was talking about something he remembered firsthand, but I found out later from two gents I met further on down the road that JeanJean (something of a local celebrity) was 73, so, no. He was quite the character, and I’m so glad I met him! He got the day off to an exceptionally jolly start.

Bucy, in the river valley between the Monts de Gy, was the usual French mix of age-old granges and modern infill. On one house the signature regional coloured tiles had been used to create a front porch, so that I could see them close to,

and some of the larger houses, especially the old granges that had been well restored, were simply beautiful.

The 200-yr old limestone town lavoir seemed incongruously stately for a working agricultural village. The original plans couldn’t be completed because Napoleon 1st had used the money from the sinking fund that the commune had earmarked for their washhouse on his campaigns. The form is that of a central church, a Greek cross, the apsidal space being taken up by the spring basin. I quite liked the concept of architecturally hallowing the communal washing of laundry.

The road climbed steeply out of the town, with beautiful views out over the hilly surrounding countryside under a lowering sky that threatened rain. Everywhere were the flowering trees I had come across yesterday, and the air was filled with their scent.

The road climbed and climbed, and the clarity of the Morthe stream running through the town became understandable when I realised this was another limestone ridge.  The soil created the conditions by the road for a plethora of lizard orchids to thrive.

An interpretation board not far from the top at 311m gave information about the special dry grassland habitats up here — poor, thin soils from which water drains quickly through the limestone rock — which are the preferred breeding ground of nightjar and which support populations of praying mantis. It’s a rare habitat now: between 50 and 75% of dry grassland in France was lost in the 20th century. Here in the Folle dry grassland above Bucy sixty species of birds have been observed and fifty species of butterflies. I’m not sure why the area is called ‘Folle’ — as far as I am aware it only means ‘crazy’. Today the dry grassland was very wet after last night’s rain, the long grasses heavy and flattened. Cuckoos were calling, though, and a nightingale.

On the first of two plateaus I would cross, land exploited for agriculture or clear felling shared space with land that had just been left to become huge wildflower meadows.

It’s astounding how much land there is in France, far more than they need for agriculture, and this seems to explain the high biodiversity that I have seen all along the Via Francigena after Bertaucourt.

The meadows were on the fringes of a huge wood that I would be walking through for about a third of the day’s walk, covering the ridges on top of the Monts de Gy.

I was back in the forest for the first time in quite a few days, but on a proper track this time, so I didn’t feel there was much to worry about. Coming towards me, I saw a chap wearing a forestry commission sweatshirt. This was Yves Guillaume, and he was my chance to ask loads of questions about the forest. First up, what was that beautiful tree with the white flowers? It was Robinia, false acacia. ‘It makes fantastic honey’. I could imagine: every tree I have come across has been covered in thousands of bees. We talked about beekeeping for a while: he said his father kept bees and I told him that Stephen had done too.

My next question was about the wild boar. I said I was frightened of them and he burst out laughing. ‘Everyone says they are more frightened of me than I am of them,’ I said, ‘but I don’t believe it.’ ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ he said, very confidently. And I really trusted him.

We talked about the bird life and he mentioned the cuckoos that he’d been hearing so many of today. He also said there were all the four kinds of woodpeckers in the forest, although I didn’t heard any of those today. And then we talked about the flowers: we identified together in French and English the wildflowers that were on the verge of the forest path around us (although he said he was better with the flora on the forest floor, he was really just being modest). He asked me about Herefordshire, and said he was a fan of little British cottages. I showed him some photographs of Stephen‘s greenwood furniture and he said that every farm round here still had a shavehorse, and they were still used for repairing items of furniture like chairs and making replacement wooden handles for tools. What a great encounter! Thank you for the chat, Yves.

The decent track stopped and the next section really was quite muddy, but I could hop around the worst bits. The rain was now pattering on the leaves above my head, but the trees here were so thick they kept me completely dry.

In the absence of wild boar, I studied the markings on some more terrific slugs. I think these two might be a leopard slug,

and the keeled Tandonia budapendensis.

The final forest section was an asphalt path along which the trees offered no shelter.  And now it started to rain in earnest. By great good fortune this happened right by an actual shelter, with a galvanised metal roof and a table with benches in the dry underneath, which I was already under because I’d decided to have lunch there.

I put on a couple of layers for warmth, and as I waited to see whether the rain would ease off a runner pounded past, hair and clothes plastered to him.

The forest was turning out to be quite the place for social encounters. Because ten minutes later, as the rain was still pouring down, another person turned up: Dalia from Lithuania who works for the EU Commission in Brussels, walking the Francigena in chunks.

Ian texted me a few nights ago to say he’d met up with three other pilgrims including Dalia, and I wasn’t quite sure how she was now overtaking me as I was a day ahead of them — but it turns out she does 40km a day.  The woman is a machine! Her normal pace is 5.5km/h but she is happy doing 6.  I was full of admiration. She had a 6pm train to catch from Besançon back home tonight, so she powered on, and it had stopped raining (I thought it might because I noticed the birds had started up singing), so I followed her a bit more slowly until she was lost to sight.

It was a tremendously green wood, this part of the forest, mostly beeches, incredibly tall and looking very much like the inspiration for an early 19th century watercolour.

One stack of timber had been there for years and was slowly being returned to the forest.

The village of Montboillot after which the forest is named seemed faintly alpine, with wooden houses or galleries,

and a steep climb up to the church which I felt would have been folly to have undertaken.

Many of the buildings in the village seemed to have had other incarnations over the years, with the traces of other doors and windows embedded on their frontages.

Out on the last of the limestone ridge there were more cows with bells around their necks, contributing to the generally alpine atmosphere, and sweeping views down into the valley, where I could see another band of rain coming in.

I wasn’t going to escape this one… and indeed I didn’t, but it only lasted six or seven minutes and then stopped.  I really had been phenomenally lucky today not to get soaked through.

My Airbnb was slightly off the route, on an industrial estate on the bear side of the next village.  My host kindly let me check in early — into an amazing studio bedsit in a modern unit which I think might be a garage workshop for racing cars. I will find out tomorrow when I have coffee with her before setting off.

In the meantime, I had to buy myself some food. Back in Etuz there was a convenience store, closed for lunch, but when I went back there at the stated opening time, it was firmly closed. I had no other choice but to schlep all the way down the main road along tomorrow’s route pinto the next village, do my shopping and then schlep back again, a 5km round trip and a madness at this end of the day. My feet could have done without that! But it did give me a preview of the magnificent Ognon river which I will cross again tomorrow on my way, finally, to the Doubs at Besançon.

Stat for the Day

Distance: a quite unnecessary 21.33 km

Which brings my grand total thus far up to exactly 900km.