The Loire Valley

The Loire is a broad, swift river which is the focus for the whole area. All of the ancient towns are built beside long bridges, and it is many miles from one to the next. It runs beside a low limestone escarpment, and it is this easily-worked stone which has been used to build all of the towns and castles. It is a lovely creamy white, so the towns are quite light, even though the streets are narrow.

The Royal Abbey of Fontevraud

Today's big event was the abbey of Fontevrau, a beautiful set of buildings, with an amazimg history, especially for those of us interested in the Early Medieval.

The original building on the site was an abbey, but it was built by the Plantagenets and was used as a sort of refuge and retirement home by them, particularly by Eleanor of Aquitaine

(Richard the Lion-heart's mum, among other things, divorced the King of France, once...), who died there in her eighties. In later centuries it was used as a school for royal girls, and a place for shuffling off the unmarriagable scions of the blue blood. Consequently it got a lot of money, and turned that into beautiful stone

- a noble thing to do with money, in my opinion. My remark about 'unusual white stone' in the page about Angers is turning out to be a laugh. Every single building more than 100 years old is built of it! It's a lovely material, but it looks as if it needs some maintenance - some of the abbey buildings looked positively dangerous

But, I'm getting ahead of myself - inside the lovely bright abbey church, dominating the nave, is none other than

Eleanor herself, her hubby and son,

and some english princess obviously thrown in for symmetry. These are painted plaster models, originally on the tombs but moved out into the aisle for all to see. Eleanor's model has quite dark skin, I don't know if it was originally that way, or something happened to the paint

Leading off on the nunnish side of the church is a lovely cloister



...and a chapter house with all the original frescos.


This is a particularly silly-looking one, with Jesus's toes protruding from the cloud as he ascends into heaven. In the corner of each painting is a nun praying


- apparently these were celebrity nuns from the Royal family, and this was how they managed to get portraits of them on the walls without breaking the Rule. Good for parents of prospective students, I suppose.

These were mostly done in the mid-sixteenth century, as this wonderfully fruity carving by the door asserts.

The general over-the-top atmosphere of the convent continues with the refectory

The gallery there is for the sister who read the scripture while everyone ate, rather than the large minstrel orchestra the architect seemed to be envisaging. The guidebook said it had a wonderful acoustic, and is now used for chamber music concerts.

After the revolution, right up until the 1950's, the place was used as a prison. They built wooden platforms inside the rooms, including the church, to give them four or five stories inside. There must have been an awful lot of cleaning to get them into their present state. The only place left manky is the tunnels underneath

...and the very strange Norman kitchen attached to the end of one of the buildings. Yes folks, this was a kitchen, for a convent...

Each of the little turrets was a chimney, with an oven beneath it.

Saumur

The Plan was, to go on to Tours and use that as a centre for touring, but the positive aspect of seeing Saumur on the way through, and the negative aspect of seeing the outskirts of Tours led me to turn around, and head back to Saumur.

The campsite here is higher-end, the whole leading third of a big island in the middle of the Loire, with the town of Saumur (two castles, very pretty) just across the river.

There are a lot of sites, and perhaps two dozen occupied, even this much out of season, but mostly with Brits and a few Dutch people. I haven't seen a single french van, perhaps they don't like the prices.

Chinon

Because of blustery rain most of week, I didn't get out as much as I'd hoped, but then, I got more work done, which has to be a good thing. My best day out was to Chinon, a little further upstream than Saumur, on the Vienne.

(Note campsite in this picture - should have stayed here, perhaps). The rivers here look strange - they are shallow, but the bottom is smooth, and you don't get the fixed ripples with water rushing past. Instead all of the ripple patterns move bodily with the flow of the river, as if it were a sheet of textured glass sliding towards the sea.

Chinon is a smaller town, and entirely ancient.

These pictures were taken from the ruined castle, which rises high above the town.

The town has winding cobbled streets and a mixture of half-timbered houses and posher ones carved out of the ubiquitous limestone.


At this time of year, there was a nice mix of local people and foreign tourists - mostly american here, for some reason. I expect it gets insane in high summer. This is the 'Best Western' hotel - odd how that chain is widespread over here.

The town's big historical theme (or quasi-historical perhaps) is...


...Jeanne D'Arc. Aparently this was where she began her heroic ride to warn somebody about the King, or warn the King about somebody, I don't know. They have a little diaroma with dolls, of her meeting the King in that very castle, and a plethora of images of her from various centuries. She seems to get more and more aggressive and shorter-haired, as the centuries go by.

Here, she looks ready for the weightlifting in the Berlin olympics. The earliest pictures of her make her look quite cute, and have ladies-in-waiting riding alongside.

Moving on

So, some interesting stuff, but a bit of a challenging week - the campsite turned out to be close to the town only as the crow flies, and over 2km on foot, no bus. And the only internet access was a youth centre another kilometre on the other side of town. In future, I shall locate the internet access before I find a campsite, I think.

One amusing internet related experience, in Chinon actually. The place was a typical room with 20 computers lined up along the sides. A dozen teenage boys came in together, and started playing a game called Tour of Duty. They are all playing in the same game, creeping around a very realistic French village, shooting at each other from behind the bombed-out buildings. Some of them were Germans, and some Americans. At one point one of them called out "hey, we have too many Americans, some of you will have to change over." Rather surreal. I asked the bloke whether there was an option to be a French soldier, and he said no, rather wryly, I thought.

The weather is a bit of a challenge, and I have wheels, so this weekend's plan (May 27-28) is to head south to better weather.