Not What I Expected to See

Yesterday as a treat we went with Niall and Antoinette to explore some of the painted churches of the Anglin Valley. As usual with these expeditions we saw a lot of excellent médiéval art, a lot of which was pretty cryptic. We did a similar trip with my cousin Linda this time last year, and things are no more clear.

We visited Chalais and its Église Saint-Léobon, which has had exploratory work done removing a thick (up to 8cm) layer of plaster removed, revealing intriguing early paintings. Unfortunately the money has run out, so at the moment you only get glimpses of what remains to be discovered.

I imagine the exclamation marks are because the 14th Century artist was as surprised as me to see a Disney Vulture

It was an excellent day out, and I even managed to find an almost sugar free dark chocolate sorbet in a tearoom in Saint-Benoît-du-Sault.

A Foreign Grotte

There are 765 recognised "Lourdes Grotto" in France. In the immediate area surrounding Preuilly-sur-Claise there are at least three: Boussay, Yzeures sur Creuse, and  (most impressively) Paulmy. 

This isn't one of them, in fact it's not even in France. This is the Lourdes Grotto next to the Sankt-Anna-Kapelle near Mulfingen, in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It's not as picturesque (or old) as those closer to home, but it's the thought that counts.

Les Telots

Another "what's that thing?" from Autun. You can't miss them, two almost perfectly conical hills rising from nowhere. It's instantly obvious what they are, not so obvious the cause.

These are the Les Télots spoil heaps. Autun sits on a large oil shale deposit which by 1837 was being exploited for gas for public lighting. The Les Télots concession was granted in 1865, and production of shale oil gas started in 1881. The refinery constructed an oil distillation plant in 1936, employing several hundred workers who produced automotive fuel. Following closure in 1957, the site was dismantled and partially demolished. Remains of the installations (ruins) and these two large spoil tips still mark the landscape, overgrown with particular vegetation studied for its biodiversity. Les Télots is recognized as a natural zone of ecological, faunistic, and floristic interest (ZNIEFF).

Firebox

What's that thing?

It's a close-up of one of these

The firebox of a steam locomotive is where combustion occurs, generating the heat that boils water into steam. 

The brick arch is a curved wall of firebrick built inside the firebox. Rather than letting hot gases rush straight from the fire into the boiler tubes, the arch forces them to travel a longer, curved path before reaching the flue openings.

This allows more complete combustion of gases and volatile matter released from the coal, which improves efficiency and reducing smoke. It also protects the tube plate from direct flame, preventing localized overheating and leaks. Additionally, the arch helps distribute heat more evenly across the firebox and it slows sparks and unburned particles from being drawn into the tubes, reducing wear and fire risk in the smokebox.

They're not ordinary bricks. Firebricks are refractory bricks made from materials like fireclay or silica, engineered to withstand extreme heat without cracking or melting.

This one is in the Cité du Train in Mulhouse. I knew about them, but I've never seen one up close.

What to do on Sunday

Go for a drive in a classic car, see an ocean of sunflowers, then go to lunch at the guinguette. It sure beats working.

Susan, Connie, Yvonne and Claudette.

Yesterday was the guinguette's classic car and oyster Sunday. Unfortunately the oyster man had a boat accident on Saturday and wasn't there, and there weren't a lot of classic cars either. Neither of those things ruined our Sunday.

The weather is getting a lot more acceptable. It was over 30°C, but at least it wasn't over 40°C!

Wear Your Helmet!

Yesterday's photo was taken on my bike ride yesterday morning. It was only a short ride, partly because it was starting to get warm again, and partly because I'd only gone out to take that photo.

What I didn't say is that I was in such a rush to take the photo and get home to publish it in time that I managed somehow to get my foot tangled in the bike as I dismounted. I landed with an almighty bang, mainly on the back of my head. This ended up with me under the bike and quite puzzled about how I was going to escape. After lying there for a minute or so I collected my thoughts, wriggled my way out, took the *#@*'!! photo and rode home.

Total damage was a bloody and slightly swollen elbow, a bit of gravel rash on my back, and a mashed helmet.

It's annoying, because it's a new helmet bought a week ago to replace my 25 year old helmet, but it could have been a lot worse.

Tomorrow I'll be calling in to Action, and buying another helmet because I've proven that they work. And I promise I'll always wear it 

That Time Of Year

This morning it was cooler, so:

Work (Not) in Progress

I am am so grateful that before my father died I was able to send him an email showing him one of my latest purchases.

In 2008* Dad and I made a shutter for what was at the time the window in our guest bedroom, and is now the shutter hiding insulation behind the hidden window in the pantry alcove. It has stood the test of time well, but now needs a proper repaint. That will happen when the weather calms down and the paint isn't in danger of evaporating from the brush, I'm not in danger of becoming dessicated, or the rain is so heavy I can't see what I'm doing.

Dad and I, proud of small things

As it stands now. I gave it a slapdash coat of a new colour 15 years ago

My new purchase. Everyone else is doing it, why shouldn't I?

*Looking back through our records I see it was actually 2007. I should have checked the blog first.

Not Normal Service Resumed

Today we might have been writing about last night, however:

We haven't been for the past few years, due to either health issues or the fact that July is when we take our holidays. This year's we're here, we're relatively healthy, and it'd be nice to be outdoors and not instantly fry.

I realise this would probably been more useful as yesterday's post, but I didn't get around to it.

Maybe next year.

Track Inspector's Draisine

Here's a "what's that thing" that surprised me and it's a real curiosity: a zoomorphic track inspector's draisine from about 1845. I can't quite work out how you balance it on rails, maybe you always keep your feet on the ground? Why didn't they put another wheel on the other track? Wolf or dragon? So many questions.

The word "draisine" traces back to Karl Drais, the German inventor whose 1817 pedestrian "Laufmaschine" — pushed along by foot, with no pedals — became an unexpected fashion craze in Paris and London under the name vélocipède or dandy horse. The fad faded within a few years, but the name stuck.

The rail version came later and separately: in 1837, Franz Aloys Bernard in Vienna adapted the draisienne concept to run on rails. Both the road and rail versions honor Drais's name, even though the rail draisine was really a different invention built for a different purpose — track inspection and maintenance rather than recreation. In French all track inspection and maintenance rail vehicles are still called draisines.

A Pochette

This is a much smaller "what's that thing?" than the past few days.

This is a pochette, a pocket violin from 1680 (ish). It was used by dancing instructors so that they could play a tune, and then pop the instrument in their pocket when demonstrating complicated steps.

The fiddle players amongst you may be interested to learn that it is tuned a third or fourth above standard, although the information sheet didn't say what the standard was likely to have been. You can bet it wasn't A= 440Hz.

This one is in the Bach Museum in Eisenach 

The Pyramid of Couhard

As we were driving into Autun two weeks ago we literally had a "what's that thing?" moment when we spotted something on top of a hill. The next day we drove up the hill to investigate. 

What we had seen was the Pyramid of Couhard, also known as the Pierre de Couhard, a Gallo-Roman monument likely marking the tomb of a wealthy or prominent citizen of Augustodunum. Rising in a sort of pyramidal form, it was built using a core of rubble and mortar, and originally faced with cut stone. Much of the cut stone has eroded away over the centuries, leaving the rough inner masonry exposed. It stood within a larger necropolis that once extended along the slopes of the area, though most other traces of that burial ground have since disappeared.

The pyramid's unusual shape sets it apart from typical Roman funerary architecture in the region, prompting long-standing debate about its exact function and inspiration. This puts it on equal footing to the more local (to us) Cinq-Mars-la-Pile.

Canal Sans Eau

A second "what's that thing?"

When we were travelling to Germany we spent a night in Troyes so we could visit the stained glass museum - we'd missed it in 2023 on our way up to Amsterdam.

I booked a Premiere Classe hotel just south of Troyes in an industrial area in the village of St Thibault. Looking at it on the map I spotted something. It needed investigation.

The Canal de la Haute-Seine was built in the 19th century to link Troyes with the wider French waterway network, and it had a short, difficult existence. Its planned extension upstream from Troyes toward Bar-sur-Seine was meant to eventually connect with the Canal de Bourgogne, but it was never finished, leaving a stretch known locally as the "canal sans eau" (canal without water). At Saint-Thibault, the unfinished Villebertin lock is a relic of this abandoned ambition.

As you can see, it's incongruous.

The Landungsbrücken Pegelturm

I may have to start a new series of blogs called "what's that thing".

The Landungsbrücken Pegelturm, part of Hamburg's St. Pauli Landungsbrücken pier complex, is a tower which features a striking green copper dome and a clock. It also has a numerical display to measure and show the Elbe River's water level. It was constructed in the early 20th century and is a recognizable landmark along the harbor promenade. The tower historically served a practical maritime function: sailors and dockworkers relied on its readings to track tides and navigate the busy Port of Hamburg safely, since the Elbe is tidally influenced despite being a river. Today, the tower is attached to what is a rather good restaurant serving traditional German brewhouse food: appropriately, because it's Hamburg's only brewery.

We had a good (and, huge) lunch there, and it wasn't until we were leaving the restaurant I noticed the tidal gauge.

Planning a Route

For the past goodness knows how many years I have been our household's "Officer in Charge: Holidays". As OIC:H I take my role seriously.

I have written previously about Organic Maps*. It is my first port of call when planning a trip. When I watch TV, listen to a podcast or read a book my phone is by my side, and I mark on Organic maps the locations of places I want to see. If Susan mentions somewhere, that goes on the list too.

Places I want to see - not an exhaustive list

When I need to go somewhere I check the "Places to visit" folder on my phone and check what I might be passing on the way. I then sketch out a route, plotting deviations to interesting places along the way. For instance: Joigny was not too far from the route I was plotting to Hamburg, so my route was tweaked to make it a point of interest and lunch stop. I then split the route into daily sections of not too far.

My planned route to and from Hamburg, colour coded for each day.

So that we don't deviate too far from the plan, I then bookmark overnight stays, lunch stops, and waypoints. These might be picnic areas, motorway junctions, points of interest, or public toilets that get good reviews. These get plotted as lat/long into the madwoman in the dashboard (the GPS in the Cactus) as and when they're needed. As the maps in the car are now 5 years out of date, this is important. We occasionally find ourselves on roads the car doesn't know about, and this could lead to serious gettinglostedness if not planned on an up to date map.

All the other places now added in.

Then it's just a case of following orders (except when I don't) and not making too many "Hey! There's a brown sign, let's follow it" decisions. We usually manage to restrict ourselves to one or two of those a day. The only time this fails is roadworks: we then follow deviation signs until we're either back on our planned track, or the car GPS comes up with a better idea.

No domestic arguments, very few as hoc discussions about what road we should be taking, and just the right amount of randomness. That's my idea of a holiday route.

*The first link is why I use it, the second is how.

https://daysontheclaise.blogspot.com/2023/12/mapping-on-go.html

https://daysontheclaise.blogspot.com/2023/12/using-organic-maps.html

The Return of the Vicar

Four years ago I bought an electric bike. I rode pretty consistently for a couple of summers, then in 2023 I received my cancer diagnosis. I continued riding, but less, because I was worried about aggravating it. Then I had the operation and it all stopped.

So the bike went away for a couple of years, the battery was put to sleep, and I tried to ignore the fact that I even owned it. There was always "next summer" which almost instantly turned into "it's too hot", "it's raining", "it's too windy" or any number of excuses.

On Monday evening I looked at the weather forecast and it was none of those things. In fact, it looked like it was going to be a day made for cycling. I messaged Tim B, he said he be here at 8:00am, and then I couldn't wriggle out of it. I charged the battery a located all the cycling accoutrements: helmet, shorts, bag of bits, phone holder, and the like.

True to his word, Tim was here at 8:00 on Tuesday morning, and guess what? I really enjoyed it. It was a very social cycle, not fast or far, but about the distance I needed to go for my first ride.

Ignore the "longest ride ever" thing. Strava has forgotten I used to go further

Yesterday I rode alone, and rode just a little too far, so today I will be taking it easier. I cycled almost to Tournon St Martin, looking for a convenient way of getting onto the Voie Verte to come home

It was only when I started writing this that I discovered that Tuesday was exactly the fourth anniversary of buying The Vicar. What a coincidence.

The Vicar at Chaumussay this morning

Jean Fouquet, 15C painter and illuminator

Jean Fouquet was born, we think, around 1420, and died before 1480. Where he spent his youth and where he trained as a painter is uncertain. He may have frequented Parisian workshops. We do know for sure that he travelled to Italy. This prolonged trip put him in contact with the most innovative artists of the Medici's Florence, and profoundly influenced his artistic style. On returning to France around 1450 he set up in Tours, putting his talents at the service of the City, and working for the local high clergy, and the most high ranking members of the Royal Court, such as the Treasurer, Etienne Chevalier, and the Chancellor Guillaume Jouvenel des Ursins.

 

Pieta by Fouquet in the church at Nouans les Fontaines.

His relationship with the King, Charles VII, is not clear, but he does paint a remarkable portrait of him. Later, in 1475, under Louis XI, he became the official royal portraitist.

 

Copy of a portrait of King Charles VII by Fouquet. The original is in the Louvre.

 

Famous in his own lifetime, Fouquet then fell into obscurity, until his rediscovery in the 19th century with the resurgence of interest in medieval art by the Romantics. In France and Germany his work as a painter and illuminator is brought to prominence and he features in a Paris exhibition of 1904. These days he is considered one of the major figures of his time in European art.

Verdant Preuilly

I am amazed. After a week of extreme temperatures (we're talking temperature not dropping much below 24°C, or 75° in the old money) Preuilly-sur-Claise is looking really green.

We've had some storms the past 2 days, but I wouldn't have thought it was enough to freshen everything up this much. Of course, it helps that the first photo is taken on the river.

These photos were taken on a 3km walk yesterday morning. I'm pleased to discover that my walking strength appears to be returning, at last.

Added Insulation

Although we now have double glazing on all our windows, we don't have shutters on a couple of them. This means that although outside heat doesn't make it into our house, direct sunlight through windows can cause a rapid increase in temperature. This is called solar gain and is not a good thing.

In 2019 I wrote about hanging my old beach towel over the back door, an approach that works well, and which we still use. This still leaves the problem of the windows in the kitchen.

I now have a new approach, which involves aluminium kitchen foil. All you need do is tear off a suitable length of tinfoil, wet the back of it, and apply to the outside of the glass. And that's it. Works superbly, and if you're a little careful you can remove the foil at night and reuse it time and time again. The water tension holds the foil in place in even quite high winds.

Even this slipshod application was massively effective, but by the time I had got outside I had already spent too much time in the heat, and couldn't be bothered making it look good.

Of course, as soon as I worked this out it has cooled down for a couple of days, but I have no doubt I'll be applying it again within a week.

Autobahn

While we're suffering from the heat (42°C is enough to stop all activity) I thought I'd look back at our recent holiday, starting with some reflections on driving on the Autobahn:

Of all the things that concerned me a month ago, top of the heap was how I would cope driving on a road where everyone is doing a million billion kilometres an hour. I need not have worried.

Despite their reputation, our experience of the Autobahn is that people tend to drive at between 110 and 120 kilometres an hour. This is slower than their French counterparts on the Autoroutes, and comes without the obligatory French tailgating and cutting in. We saw a couple of high speed heroes, but we usually caught them up at the next traffic jam. I was only hooted at once for not getting out the way quickly enough (i.e. not cutting up a truck), and that was by a Belgian car. Otherwise it appears to be that the slower cars hold the moral high ground.

The place where the French roads score is road surface: some of the Autobahns had decidedly ropey surfaces, lane closures, contraflows, and there were a lot of roadworks. Many of the roads we travelled were only two lanes each way, with trucks restricted to the right lane. This meant that if we wanted to just cruise along we tucked in behind a truck doing our preferred speed and stayed there.

They are boring, though. Real concentration is necessary to avoid drifting off, especially when it's hot and there's nothing to look at besides the road surface.  Although good road surfaces were pretty rare, so even then there was quite a lot to look at.

One novelty we encountered was the electric highway system. We travelled beneath the wires on the experimental stretch just south of Lubeck. Unfortunately we didn't see any vehicles using it, so you'll have to content yourself with this video.

The Tree(s) of Jesse

Because I did a lot of research before our recent Jaunt up to Germany I was able to plan in a number of surprise stops for Susan.

The Tree of Jesse is one of Christian art's most enduring images — a genealogical tree rising from the belly of sleeping figure of Jesse, father of King David, bearing the ancestors of Christ upon its branches, crowned by the Virgin and Child. There are Trees of Jesse all over the place, including two in Issoudun that Susan wrote about eleven years ago.

We stopped in Joigny for lunch, but also so we could look at a 16th-century (1530) half-timbered house which has a Tree of Jessie on its wooden façade, with sinuous branches spreading up to the triangular gable, adorned with grape clusters and fifteen figures.

In Troyes, the Cité du Vitrail (stained glass) museum has a 16th-century Tree of Jesse from Laines-aux-Bois as a centrepiece of its collection.

They're like London buses. You wait ages for one, then two come along at once.

Home to the Heat

We arrived home at about 5pm on Monday evening, and home was like an oven - close to 40°C. Sleeping was difficult, the minimum temperature overnight was 26°C, which is far too hot to sleep properly. At midnight last night it was 30°.

Yesterday we got 42 ° at about 6pm, and one again it didn't really cool down overnight. It doesn't look like we're getting real relief any time soon.

The weather has been described as a "widespread, lasting and intense" heatwave. Hundreds of heat records were broken yesterday, with temperatures exceeding the 43°C mark. It was the hottest day ever recorded in France since records began in 1947.

Météo-France announced that 58 departments will be on heatwave red alert today, four more than yesterday.

I'm starting to miss the cold and drizzle of Hamburg.

The Great Flood

Because we are surrounded by rivers, including major ones like the Creuse, this area has been subject to some significant flooding over the centuries. One such was the flood of 23 June 1848, which prompted Charles Mourault to compose a poem and inscribe it on a stone in a wall overlooking the river at Baratière, a hamlet outside of Yzeures sur Creuse. Here's my rough translation.

 

The Creuse at Baratière.

 

"Here is where the dreaded scourge stopped that God made us go through in these deplorable days. The water rose without end and everyone left their refuge. Which in that moment look like islands. The fertile plain, the most precious treasure, offers us nothing more than the shadow of death. The people gather on this sad shore, lamenting their fate, saying what slavery. The river ressembled the foaming sea which in its expanse had become so threatening. Oh peoples who are the successors of this century may God protect you from such a great misfortune."

 

Flooding like this is relatively rare, but when it comes, causes significant damage. Nowadays the municipalities involved will declare a disaster (Fr. catastrophe) and everyone affected is guaranteed cover by their insurance.

Thanks to Bruno Guitton who showed me the inscription, and to Alain Chartier who sent me a transcription and details of the inscription's date and author.

2026 Holiday Day 20

Autun - Preuilly-sur-Claise 

A strange day full of bittersweet memories.

Our accommodation in Autun was a convent that is now a retirement home - that rents out appartements.

Autun has a lot of very old buildings. Even if the facade looks newish.

The church is enormous and obvious.

More Burgundian roofs. This was the military college.

We stopped for a roadside picnic lunch, but it was so hot (40°) that we sat in the car. My dad loved custard tarts, so this was the obvious choice of dessert.

Distance travelled 316km, Cumulative totals: