Dual cabbage-ways: Tours to Aze

March 19, 2015

"Are you French?", they asked. "When you tour the Loire valley, everyone you meet is foreign"

A FRIEND of mine, when he was touring in rural Ireland, remarked to a country gent that there were happily no dual carriageways on his route. I should point out here that, in European English, a dual carriageway is a divided highway, with a wall of grass or even a metal barrier to separate traffic going in different directions. Traffic there can be depended on to be faster than a cyclist would choose.

"Well, no, sir, you have it very right," the Irishman said. "No call for that sort of thing round here. It's very rural, you see. The best we could offer you would be dual cabbage-ways."

Well, I had no dual carriageways today, either. But I did have plenty of roads through cabbage fields. And I felt happy enough after yesterday's tiredness that I could have kissed every cabbage I passed. Are there no limits to the good that plenty of food and an indecent amount of sleep will do?

Former troglodyte homes: in a car, you'd sweep by without looking

For all that there's a preponderance of cabbage, this is an interesting part of the world. For some reason, people here even in recent times used to live like cavemen. Troglodytes, digging holes in the cliff and bolting on a front door and calling it home. And not just here and there, either; I passed abandoned caves time and again. Sometimes there'd be a row of them and now and then you'd see one used as a garage or a store room, a new house built in front of it.

It's been a while now since the local council turfed people out of these caves but generations had lived there before them. Someone discovered that the stone, known as tuffeau, could be quarried not in shattered fragments but in nicely shaped blocks like giant sugar cubes. Put on a cart, pulled away by horse, they could be heaped back together to create an attractive house for rich people, a medieval Legoland.

That left a decent hole at ground level and the people who'd dug it, or anyone else who fancied, could move in. The stone could be extracted easily and so, when they needed another room, they just dug until they had one. The more de luxe residences even had windows to relieve what must have been a dark, lamp-lit existence, and they all had chimneys because to this day you see their metal pipes poking through the earth.

The good thing about a house like this was that in troubled times, when a horse-borne army belonging to someone unpleasant was heading your way, you could scuttle into your cave and disguise the front door and keep your head down until they went away again. This tended to happen a lot during the Wars of Religion as people went about spreading goodwill and Christian charity at the point of a sword.

Those who live in the area don't care any more. And if you were visiting by car, you'd just sweep by and see nothing but holes in the cliff with a lot of vegetation obstructing them. On a bike, you can stop and satisfy your curiosity. That's the good thing about a bike.

It's election day here today. France has shuffled its districts and their administration and, a first, insisted that candidates present themselves not individually but in pairs — a man and a woman. There are election posters everywhere and discontent with the left-wing government in Paris is expected to translate itself as an advance for the far-right Front National, which has a hang-up about immigrants, the euro, the European Union and everything else that's cropped up since the 1950s.

The election is going on and party posters hope to recruit the final hesitant

I've seen people going to vote in a lot of villages but survey results aren't allowed on election day and so it won't be until tomorrow that I can sit down with a paper and a coffee and see what's happened.

Oh, and in the end the cabbages gave way to a string of pretty places that'd catch anybody's camera, especially the villages with dominating castles, the homes of those who defended the cave people years ago or were responsible for their holing up there and closing the door in the first place.

Pretty Lavardin, with its dominant castle...

I rode on beside the Loir, the one without an e, and called it a day in a string of almost continuous places distinguished only by their changing names. It didn't look promising for wild camping until I saw signs for a municipal soccer field, which can often be a good lead, and beyond that a stretch of half-managed parkland beside the river. I found a hedge to protect me from the wind, waited the obligatory minutes to see if anybody was coming to ask what I was doing there, put up my tent, cooked a meal, closed the doors on myself like a troglodyte, and fell asleep.

The château at Villandry: too bleak and austere for my taste but a wow with tourists

For a lot of today I was on the St Jacques de Compostelle pilgrimage route. The shell on the sign is the faithful's symbol. Originally, they collected one when they reached the end. Then people began selling them only partway along the way so that you could buy one and lie about having walked the whole way

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