Boules and maps

Saturday morning in the little village of St Vérain. I hear shouts while still some way off and wonder what's going on. It's a boules tournament. 

Everyone's there, outside the church. People of all ages including lots of youth clacking their boules together in a macho way. 

St Vérain is towards the bottom of this 1:100,000 map. These are great maps with good colours and perfect for planning - the GR is the dashed red line. 

But not quite detailed enough for each day's walking. For that I use 1:25,000 maps, downloaded onto my phone for just 15 euros a year for all of France. Not bad! Here's the detail, after zooming in, near Bitry, to the north-east of St Vérain in the map above. 

The extra detail allows all sorts of off-piste excursions from the GR. I took a lovely farm track from Bitry, the solid black line running down to the bottom left corner. These excursions usually work well but this time it was boots off and wading a stream swollen by overnight rain. The water was over my knees!

Finally, here is a map from an information board at the side of the Loire that shows the ground covered in the last couple of weeks. Vendôme and then Blois to the top left, across the forests of the Sologne to Gien, Briare with its pont-canal, and lastly, via the woods on right, to Cosne sur Loire. 

Canals and a road

The Sologne's Canal de la Sauldre was unique - cut off from other waterways. Upstream along the Loire from Gien is the real thing. At Briare, the canal of the same name (completed as long ago as 1642) meets the river, thus joining the Loire with the Seine. On the other bank, the amazing Loire 'lateral canal' starts, following the river for about 200km, a key element of a reliable inland waterway to the Mediterranean. And, to cap it all, in 1896 the fantastic 'pont canal' or aqueduct was built across the river to join the two canals. Here is the imposing entrance and then my first view of the lateral canal as it turns towards the aqueduct, with Briare in the background. 

The aqueduct is over 600m long and some 6m wide, and until quite recently was the longest 'pont canal' in the world. The railings have the elegant top row with the circle motif of other 19th century bridges I've seen. 

See an earlier post for bridge railings on the Canal de la Sauldre. And here is a bridge on a minor road back in the Sarthe. 21st century bridge builders just give us horrendous crash barriers! 

Yesterday was another ferociously hot day. The barley is ripening but the farmers lack rain and are watering their maize and even wheat. I cooled off under the spray of a leaking pipe valve. The real spray would have been even better. 

I decided to cut away from the river and canal for a couple of days and walked for several miles on a track that had been a Roman road (one that joined the Rhone-Saone to the Loire in a pre-canal age). Or 'still is' rather than 'had been' maybe, as the cobbles were very hard on the feet!

But it led through woods thick with White Admiral butterflies at almost every step, and my passing surprised a red squirrel, a large fox, and lots of frogs which quickly jumped into puddles. And towards evening for the first time I heard a Hoopoe and saw and heard Bee-eaters, more evidence of moving south. 

The Loire again

Gien. The Sologne has been crossed and it is back to the Loire again. Gien is about to commemorate its bombing in June 1940 as the Germans harried the retreating French forces. The destruction of the old centre was large, including the church next to the chateau. 

The town has various poster displays of the damage. Here is one looking down from the chateau over the old town and the early 18th century bridge. 

And here is the chateau and rebuilt town and church taken from the other end of the bridge, and then a photo of the bridge itself taken from underneath the huge pollarded plane trees you can see in the first picture. 

Now the chateau and then one looking down over the town to the river, the small part of the town the other side, and beyond. 

All looks a bit familiar perhaps... Yes, Blois. The resemblance seemed uncanny at times - the wonderful bridge, its position in relation to chateau, church, and the town, the apparent ribbon of houses fronting the river on the other side. But Blois is bigger and grander. And its chateau was not closed for 2011-17 for restoration, the current fate of Gien's! Hence we missed the museum of hunting in the Gien one, which made us feel better about missing the museum of poaching back in the Sologne at Chaon. 

We now becomes I again. Jay, my Sologne companion, leaves to take the train to Paris. The photo above is taken in front of the rebuilt church, dedicated to Joan of Arc who came to Gien several times in 1429 (we saw an auberge where she allegedly spent a night). The dates on the back of Jay's T-shirt in the one below are for a Ray Davies tour in the 1990s. Good taste!

Leaving the forest, perhaps

Another two days of moving east across the Sologne and Jay and I are nearing the end of the woods - we think. They have yielded up a great deal of pleasure and one or two surprises. For example, this enormous Robin Hood oak - the trunk had a circumference of about 25 feet. 

There is much of the following in the Sologne, which limits any short cuts and off-piste excursions from the footpath, the GR.

But with the many private estates, seeming to impede easy progress, go some lovely little chateaux. This is the Château de Montfranc. 

And this the moated Château de Chaon. The 2CV did not seem to have been placed just for the photo opportunities. 

Chaon's bread-buying possibilities are a big step up from a baguette machine. We bought our bread from the mayor's secretary, the Mairie being the 'dépôt de pain'. 

Yesterday brought a great deal of road walking for once. But today it was some very pleasant shady canal walking. The Canal de la Sauldre, built in the mid-19th century, is unique in France for being unconnected to any other navigable waterway. Its 45 km served only to bring water for irrigation into the Sologne and, even more important, marl to serve as fertiliser to improve the acid soil. This photo is taken from one of the frequent bridges crossed by estate tracks, all with the same distinctive iron railings. 

The canal is fed by the largest of the Sologne's lakes, the Étang du Puits, which on a glorious windy afternoon seems almost Mediterranean. 

Still in the forest

The Sologne continues to envelope. We - I have been joined at Blois by Jay - are three days in, at present at the little village of St Viâtre. The sandy tracks make for easy pleasant walking, especially as it has now cooled down to a reasonable temperature again. 

But the heat was good for swimming! Here is one of the Sologne's little lakes in which we had the perfect dip. 

And the butterfly count is going up. This one is a White Admiral, which I had hoped the Sologne would produce. Both sides of the wings are a treat to behold. 

Into the forest

The Sologne is a vast flat area of forest and little lakes to the east of Blois and to the south of the big loop in the Loire that has its apex at Orléans. The route now lies straight through it, eastwards, until meeting the Loire again higher up at Gien. As the crow flies, it's about the distance of Southampton to central London, although the GR zigzags quite a lot from village to village. 

It's not all forest however, especially on this first day. Indeed there is too much open country on what is suddenly a searingly hot, windless afternoon. Walking seems a whole lot harder! One of the open bits has this huge display of poppies in amongst a field of oil seed rape. 

The Sologne is the area of the mysterious demesne in Alain Fournier's classic 1913 coming-of-age novel 'Le Grand Meaulnes' where Meaulnes meets Yvonne de Galais for the first time. (I've only read it in English - so far, but who knows!) Most of the forest is in private hands, large estates where hunting is as important as any logging. Luckily, it's not the hunting season now, although preparations are in hand. 

And now the Loire

Blois, and the Loire. A milestone - see Charlotte's map in the first post to the blog ('The Plan'). The Loire is France's longest river - over 1,000km. And although I'll leave it shortly, it will be a constant for a couple of weeks again soon. It's a fantastic sight on a windy sunny day and photo after photo fails to do it justice. Here's the view looking south across the river from the main town on the right bank. 

The classic views of the river and of Blois are taken from the left bank. These photos are of 'the' bridge, the early 18th century Pont Jacques Gabriel. The first shows the twin towers of the church of St Nicholas and, less obviously, the chateau, while the second shows the cathedral, undergoing work.  

When I arrive in the late afternoon there are Terns tumbling and diving in the breeze, a bird one thinks of as coastal (the 'sea swallow') - who knows how far we are inland - all emphasising the vast expanse of the river, waves with white horses whipped up by the wind. And finally another attempt to capture river, bridge and town with, I hope, Jupiter at least faint and top left and Venus clear and in the centre. 

The chateau is a must and this is the Louis XII wing from the late 15th/early 16th century, from within the courtyard. 

And the towers of St Nicholas. 

Coming here from Vendôme, I walk for a while on this old railway track. (T, H and C will remember a longer stretch in Cuba.)

And that morning I nearly trod on this. I think it is an Asp Viper, somewhat more poisonous than an adder, but I was not going to hang about to check further.