Category Archives: Walking

A Christmas Day Walk above Montrichard

December 25, 2016 Rosemary Kneipp 3 Comments

It’s 25th December and overcast. The sun has obviously decided not to waste its energy on people about to tuck into Christmas lunch inside their homes where they won’t know if it rains or shines. We celebrated Christmas with just the two of us last night as our four adult children are all elsewhere this year, which is not a problem of course. We need some rest! We’ve had our brunch and are ready to go for a little hike. Despite the lack of sun, it’s really quite balmy at 9°C. Our recent walks have been a lot chillier.

I’ve chosen Montrichard as our starting point because there is a GR hiking trail high above the Cher River and it seems there are even troglodytes. We try to hike in winter in places where we can’t cycle in the winter.

One of the Renaissance buildings – this is Hôtel d’Effiat, 16th and 17th century

We park in Montrichard and there is not a soul in sight. It’s easy to take photographs with no one around – not even cars! The ruins of the mediaeval castle are omnipresent. We hadn’t realised how many Renaissance buildings there are in Montrichard.

There are also several brightly-coloured 15th century half-timbered houses.

Our GR trail takes us up a hill past the 11th century Preacher’s House, the only house that survived when Philippe Auguste ordered the town to be razed to the ground by fire in 1188 to get rid of the English invaders.

We walk up steep winding steps until we reach the highest point where the castle stands.

The path then takes us through a little wood and down another steep path.

An unexpected little boat — An unexpected boat, looking very bright in comparison with the dismal day

A little blue boat seems a little far from the river today.

Around the next corner we come to a vineyard.

We walk through another forest and come to a bitumen road just after two picnic tables and several mounds of beer bottles. This can’t be right – we must have missed the signs, so we back-track and find ourselves overlooking a village with more troglodyte houses.

After a teabreak halfway down to the village, we start heading home. The sky brightens a little and then it starts spitting lightly.

We walk around the castle but there’s a fence to keep trespassers out of course.

We end our walk along the Cher. We can see a couple of people on the “beach” where we enjoyed a welcome ice-cream the summer before last after a hot ride along the river.

Our path back to the car takes us past the town hall, looking very festive. Joyeuses fêtes, it says, “Happy Holidays”. May I wish you all a happy Christmas as well!

Happy Holiday wishes at the town hall in Montrichard

Loire Valley, Walking

A Walk Along the Cisse to Coulanges

December 10, 2016 Rosemary Kneipp 8 Comments

It’s Sunday and we are continuing our walk along the GR track starting at Chouzy-sur-Cisse, first to Coulanges where we have never been before, then to Chambon sur Cisse. The sun gradually comes out but it remains quite chilly. We walk about 10 km which is quite a lot for me.

Moss has taken over may of the roofs as winter approaches

The door looks as though it's some sort of religious building. It's only later on that we realise it's an abbey. — The door looks as though it’s some sort of religious building. It’s only later on that we realise it’s an abbey.

We don't know whether this pump was originally in this spot. — We don’t know whether this pump was originally in this spot.

The town hall in Coulanges, surprisingly large for such as small town.

There are no shops so the bread is delivered from Chouzy-sur-Cisse 4 kilometers away.

Many former openings are now bricked up.

it's hard to know where the roofs stops and the vegetation begins — it’s hard to know where the roofs stops and the vegetation begins

View of the bridge from the walking tracks along the Cisse

The pumpkin on the landing probably has something to do with Halloween

Looks like a great place to spend a summer day

Santa having a little rest before the hard work of Christmas

I'm always surprised to see palm trees so far north but it shows how mild the winter must be next to this part of the Cisse — I’m always surprised to see palm trees so far north but it shows how mild the winter must be next to this part of the Cisse

Art, Loire Valley, Walking

A Walk from Chambon to Molinleuf – 6 kilometers of surprises

November 7, 2016 Rosemary Kneipp 14 Comments

It’s November 1^st, All Saints’ Day, which is a public holiday in France. It’s supposed to be sunny but the fog hasn’t lifted all morning. After lunch, it finally clears but it is only 11°C instead of the promised 14°C. I wonder sometimes at the lack of synchronization between the weather gods and the weather.

The first washhouse at Chambon sur Cisse

Jean Michel checks the map and suggests we walk along the GR tracks near Molineuf in the Cisse Valley so we can make the most of the autumn colours. GR means Grande Randonnée and corresponds to the long-distance hiking trails across France, http://www.gr-infos.com/gr-en.htm, indicated by red and white lines. We have a standing joke that if the path is muddy and uncomfortable, it’s a GR but it hasn’t been raining much recently so we should be OK.

The GR hiking sign — The GR hiking trail sign

We park our car in Chambon sur Cisse next to the GR. The first thing we see is a wash-house with a perfect picnic table next to it. We’ll have to remember it for another time.

We soon discover that our GR trail is also cycling itinerary n° 21. How come we’ve never seen it before? Locally we use the Châteaux à Vélo map and we don’t know any other itineraries so close to home. Very mysterious.

The red and white signs are not far behind and show us that we have to turn left. So far, so good.

The bitumen road takes us to Bury where we see a wall with a bread oven and a door. Looks like the perfect place to celebrate bread-baking day! Jean Michel says it’s of recent construction but I don’t mind. I think it looks very inviting.

The second washhouse in Bury — The second washhouse on the Cisse in Bury

A little further on is a second wash-house with some little steps leading down on one side to the water.

On the right we see what looks like the remains of a fortified wall and that’s exactly what it is – the remains of an 11^th century wall around the feudal castle of Bury, restored by the local Lions Club, the municipality and a local construction firm.

A little further on we see a carpet of wild cyclamens.

There is a fork in the road and no indication of which one the GR takes so we choose the left, following a sign that says Saint Secondin, 12^th century, and takes us past a locksmith with a giant key on the wall.

The church hoves into sight on a rise overlooking a little valley.

Since it’s 1^st November, there are quite a few people putting the traditional chrysanthemums on family graves in anticipation of All Souls’ Day (2^nd November). Twenty million pots are sold every year. The tradition, which replaced that of lighting candles, which symbolize life after death, dates back to 1919 when France was celebrating the first anniversary of the armistice of World War I on November 11^th. President Poincaré wanted flowers put on all the tombs of France and one of the rare flowers that comes into bloom at that time of the year is the chrysanthemum. The tomb-flowering date gradually shifted from 11^th to 2^nd November.

Over to the right, in the middle of a field I see a most surprising thing – a giant flower pot containing a large tree. A quick search of the Internet when I get home does not give me any clue about its existence.

A little further on, we come across an unusual sign that says “Private parking lot of the D’Aymons – to be used only to visit them”. The D’Aymons turn out to be a group of wooden sculptures in Indian file. A charter explains how to become a member of the D’Aymons “class-less” society where time is the only currency.

The third washhouse in Molineuf — The third washhouse on the Cisse in Molineuf

We arrive in Molineuf, which is a contraction of Moulin Neuf (new mill) and see our third washhouse on the Cisse.

We turn left past the aptly named Hôtel du Pont, which is closed but looks most inviting with its terrace on the Cisse.

A little further is a stunning holly bush. I’ve never seen one so full of red berries. I’m going to check out a few gardening videos to see how I can increase the production on my own bush!

We choose a bench in front of the local Town Hall for our tea and biscuits and discuss which route we’ll take to go home.

After retracing our steps, we turn left so that we are walking downhill from the church of Saint Secondin and have an excellent view of the potted tree.

The silent tractor with the potted tree on the right

Jean Michel is very pleased because he will at last be able to see the brand of a tractor he has been watching out of the corner of his eye. It is remarkably quiet, he tells me. It’s a German Fendt.

We arrive back in Bury and Jean Michel takes a closer look at the modern sculpture of a horse made by a local community called “Le Foyer Amical”.

Further left we see a massive thicket of bamboo. I didn’t know they could grow so high.

We walk back to the car having covered a total of six kilometers. I can’t believe that we can have seen so many unusual things in a such a short space of time in a tiny country area!

This post is a contribution to Lou Messugo’s All About France blog link-up. For other contributions, click here.

Books, Cycling, France, Walking

Chickens with Blue Legs – Introducing Susie Kelly

December 2, 2015 Rosemary Kneipp 14 Comments

I am an avid reader and being a translator gives me every excuse to indulge my passion. If I didn’t read at least one or two books a week, I could lose my English. Not that I haven’t lost it a bit anyway. Speaking and hearing French all day has a tendency to contaminate my native tongue and I end up writing things like “vigilante” instead of “security men”.

So, I am utterly addicted to my Kindle Paperwhite 3G because it means I am never short of reading material because no matter where I am in the world, I can download another book. It has a built-in dictionary, I can look up Wikipedia and adjust the size of the letters. I finally decided to subscribe to the Kindle Unlimited programme where I pay 9.90 euro a month to borrow an unlimited number of books. Jean Michel, whose Kindle is connected to the same Amazon account, can also benefit from my subscription. Not all books are included – far from it – and it’s not always easy to track down good reading material but every so often I come across a new author whose books I devour.

That is the case of Susie Kelly, who was born in post-war London, grew up in Kenya and has been living near Poitiers since 1995. I started with her biography, “I wish I could say I was sorry”, the fascinating story of a misfit child who suddenly finds herself transported to Kenya with her parents at the age of eight. She loves her new life : “Cinderella must have felt like this when the glass slipper fitted. I was no longer a little bundle in a liberty bodice and leggings, but a princess in pretty cotton frocks in a land of perpetual sunshine.”

Unfortunately it doesn’t last. Cinderella finds herself having to choose between her mother and father after their marriage falls apart. So she chooses the house and the country she loves – and indirectly her father – and doesn’t see her mother for another 17 years. In the meantime, she is sent to live with her paternal grandparents in England, where she is not wanted. When she finally returns to Nairobi, her father has remarried and she has a half sister.

Her stepmother, Helen, is psychologically unfit to be around children of any sort, and Susie finds herself truly in the role of Cinderella. However, when she is 14, another Cinderella provides an escape route, “an Arab-Somali cross … a sparky and unpredictable ride” whom she loved “as I had never loved before, instantly and overwhelmingly”.

I’m not going to tell you any more, because I also want to talk about some of her other books and resuming someone’s life story can’t possibly do it justice. “Bon Voyage” is a good place to start because it is a collection of the first chapters of several books, namely “Travels with Tinkerbelle – 6,000 miles around France in a mechanical wreck”, “Best Foot Forward – A 500-mile walk through hidden France”, “The Valley of Heaven and Hell – Cycling in the Shadow of Marie Antoinette” and “Swallows & Robins – The Guests in my Garden”.

After my appetite had been whetted by “Bon Voyage, I read “Best Foot Forward” and am now nearly finisihed “The Valley of Heaven and Hell”. I could have waited until I had read all Susie’s books before writing this post, but I think it’s a pity not to share my enthusiasm right now. Susie has an inimical way of writing, both poetical and down-to-earth at the same time.

Her factual account of her travels is interspersed with highly readable historical information about people and places. In “Best Foot Forward”, she walks across France by herself, from La Rochelle to Geneva, with a heavy backpack, a tent without a fly (a mistake I once made myself), a set of outdated maps and badly blistered feet despite her excellent boots.

“There was a narrow strip of grass beside the road”, she tells us when she can’t find a hiking path, “and it looked pretty scattered with daisies, 19 buttercups, dandelions already turned to fairy colonies, bluebells and cowslips, cow parsely still green, and purple vetch all struggling not to get onto the tarmac and be crushed. It was just their luck that I came along in the gigantic hiking boots, because I am pretty certain that very few people had ever been stupid or misguided enough to walk on the side of this particular road.”

Her journey takes her through the town of Bresse famous for its chickens, “with their snowy white plumage, blue legs and little golden toenails”. With their red crests, they are highly patriotic. Now that is the sort of little tidbit that I love. I know about and have eaten poulet de Bresse but I did not know about the blue legs.

The aim of the cycling trip recounted in “The Valley of Heaven and Hell”, in the company of her husband Terry, a far more intrepid cyclist than Susie, is to follow the “identical route taken by Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI when they tried to escape from the Revolution, and their journey back to their executions”.

Her account of their trip includes an historical account of the flight of the royal couple who finally come to a standstill when they are recognised by a postman, the famous Mr Drouet.

“The royal family spent the night in the grocery shop of the aptly named M. Sauce. Louis did almost nothing to help himself and his family, accepting his situation stoically, unable to make up his mind, or uninterested enough to take a possible escape route proposed by the Duc de Choisel. He did at least have the presence of mind to ask for a bottle of wine and some bread and cheese. He was not a man to let adversity spoil his appetite.”

Some of her cycling adventures remind me of our own predicaments when cycling paths suddenly disappear, for example. One day, they find themselves too close to the Marne. “Terry was going into the river, with his bike, camera, all our clothes and money. Unable to do anything useful, I shrieked to show moral support. He somehow managed to find a space for his left foot on a sliver of firm ground and gingerly pushed himself to the right, away from the edge, while I held my breath as if doing so would somehow be helpful.”

I’ve nearly reached the end of the book, which ends with a visit to the prison where Marie-Antoinette’s lived her last days in Paris.

Next on the list is “Travels with Tinkerbelle”. Why don’t you join me?

All her books are, of course, available in paperback*.

Oh, and don’t let me forget. Susie also has a blog called No Damn Blog.

All the books can be ordered in paperback from bookstores worldwide, or direct from any Amazon outlet. The ISBNs are as follows:

9780993307010 Swallows and Robins

9780993092299 The Valley of Heaven and Hell

9780993092275 Best Foot Forward

9780993092282 Travels with Tinkerbelle

9780993092220 I Wish I Could Say I Was Sorry

Les Grouets, Walking

A Peaceful Walk in Les Grouets

November 22, 2015 Rosemary Kneipp 8 Comments

We are still reeling from the news of the terrible terrorist attacks in Paris on the evening of Friday 13th November. Our vegetable vendor at the market on Saturday receives a call from her son at 11 am while she is serving us. He lives with other students in the area where the killings took place but she hasn’t been able to get onto him. You can imagine her relief when she learns he is safe and sound. We have been listening to the news on the radio and reading details on the iPad. We don’t have a television set and I am careful not to watch any videos. By Sunday afternoon, we need to commune with nature. Fortunately it’s reasonably warm and sunny.

We walk down our street, Rue Basse des Grouëts, towards Blois until we get to Rue des Blanchets with its little hothouse. We cross the busy highway and go down the path towards the Loire. We’ve already explored to the right on an earlier occasion, so this time we turn left. We are pleasantly surprised by how lovely the path is.

Down to the left, we can just make out the city of Blois.

We eventually come to a house on the left that we have only seen from the main road. We would never have imagined what it’s like from the other side. Lots of large windows have been added to make the most of the view.

Further along the path we see another house that we have also only seen from the road. We’re surprised at the intricate sculpting on the gable.

Next, to our great surprise, we come across a bridge near to a culvert. The path is quite steep on the other side. We certainly couldn’t have cycled here!

Jean Michel tells me we’ve come to the end of the track, but we haven’t. It veers off again to the right so we keep following until we come to a little bench among the trees.

We come out of the little wood and can see swans on the river. We’re impressed this year at just how many there are.

The Blois walking sign indicating we are to cross the main road.

By now we’ve walked for about an hour and a quarter so we’ll need to start on our way back if we want to get home by dark. The walking path takes us across the main road again and onto Chemin du Petit Pont (little bridge path).

The sign at the start of Chemin du Petit Pont

The house on the corner has a very interesting mosaic with the “little bridge” at the top and François I’s salamander and crown at the bottom.

We walk through the tunnel under the railway line and come out on a grassy area.

Fortunately, there is a sign telling us to take a sharp turn left onto a path leading to Chemin du Saut aux Moines (monks’ leap path?) which we would never have found otherwise.

We climb the path thtat takes us up to the Paris to Tours railway line that runs behind our house. The path moves away from the tracks until we turn left on Chemin de Pomone.

A very old house at the top of the hill just before rue Pomone

At the end of Chemin de Pomone we turn left into Rue des Moriers.

We take the next right into Rue des Poutils, which has an orchard on one side and a very large house in the distance.

An orchard and large house on the corner of Rue Poutils

At the end of Rue des Poutils we turn right into Rue Galandeau where Jean Michel wants to show me the cemetary. I didn’t even know we had one in Les Grouets!

It’s very quiet and peaceful. We wander through and I recognise some local names but am surprised to see that most of the tombs are 20th and 21st century. I later learn that it’s because the time has run out on some of the plots and they haven’t been renewed.

White crosses in the cemetary depicting soldiers

I’m particularly taken with the white metal crosses, several of which have soldiers on them. We come out of the cemetary and continue along Rue Galandeau until we reach Rue de l’Hôtel Pasquier, which is known terrain. It leads into our own street, Rue Basse des Grouëts, with the local church on the corner.

Our local church on the corner of Rue de l'Hôtel Pasquier and Rue Basse des Grouëts — Our local church on the corner of Rue de l’Hôtel Pasquier and Rue Basse des Grouëts

The return journey has taken us an hour, so the entire loop is 2 1/4 hours, about 7 k altogether. We get home in time for afternoon tea in front of the fire feeling much better than when we set out – but, even so, it takes me a week to write this post!

The map on the corner of Rue Basse des Grouëts and Rue de l'Hôtel Pasquier. The circle shows the church. The wriggly green line is the path we took. — The map on the corner of Rue Basse des Grouëts and Rue de l’Hôtel Pasquier. The circle shows the church. The wriggly green line is the path we took.

Aussie in France