June 14 - So here we are in La Loire again only this time it is near Orleans which we had not visited before. I always feel, when I reach the Loire, that I am as it were at home or at least
nearly there. I think this is because, in our younger days, we would arrive at Calais or wherever and put pedal to the metal and hot foot it to somewhere on the Loire, thus securing our berth in France.
While we have had actual holidays only at Saumur and Chinon many short stops have taken in Angers, Blois, Ambois. We have been to some eight or nine Loire chateuax but some of the cream has evaded us. Of course the Loire chateaux do rather stretch the English value of the word itself. French can be a bit short of words as I have already noted in this context. These are mostly palaces or at least grand houses. Since the French use chateau to mean castle they are understating it in these parts. We English have to hold our breath rather as we decide if the ornate, grand and palatial mansion before us can even provide the slightest indication that it was once a castle. Irrelevant in a sense but I am a castle man first and a grand mansion man second. More English Heritage than National Trust. And these would all be in the NT not the EH you see.
Now to the Loire, alongside which we are camped, though we cannolt see it for the anti-flood levee. We are at a town called Jargeau - as in soft g-ar-soft g-OH. Freed by Joan of Arc soon after Orleans and very proud of it. I just rest on the knowledge that it was the French who named here heritic at first and the Burgundian French who burned the great heroine, not the accursed English. Strange the way it goes.
But the Loire. A grand and huge river, largest in France. It starts way down in Allier where it shares its head waters with the Lot and the Allier. But the Lot heads south and west. The
Loire heads north and is for its first couple of hundred kilometres a wild and unruly river crashing though the central massif. After gathering up the waters of the Allier it begins to trend west and after Nevers enters the Paris Basin, a huge and flat area of soft sandstones and mud. The Loire become the river we best know, slow, lugubrious, meandering unmercifully and braided into islands and sand banks. It is home to slow fish, sluggish eels, hungry pike and even hungrier herons and egrets. This was also fighting country, as the former Normans fought the French and became the proto-English fighting the French. By the time they had sorted things out the mighty castles were redundant and rapidly became the palaces and stately homes of the French nobility. The power and the glory went to their heads which were rapidly removed by the French revolutionaries.
Some chateaux were promptly destroyed by the Revolution and down south the remnants of these castles can still be seen. Some are crumbling ruins, some are splendid new homes, privately owned and sometimes open to us plebs. But the Loire was prime real estate and the Revolution needed money so a great many grand palaces remained and were soon re-assigned to new nobility or old nobility that had seen the light of Republicanism soon enough to survive. Hundreds more were held by the state as cultural heritage. Many became Hotels de Ville and even Mairies. Many more were sold. Then, years later in the 20th century more were sold. In the 60s there was a major sale, many more in the 80s. And incredibly yet more are for sale right now - get your millions ready. For you too could own a French chateau, along with the cost of upkeep....
The numbers of 'chateaux' in France is breathtaking - there are 800 in the Dordogne alone! I have a book that lists the majority that are open to the public. It runs to a thousand pages
and none get more then half a page...
But the Loire is an impressived river for sure. I just find the area dull. The architecture is bland, the land is sandy, flat and tedious. The culture is more north than midi. It has been improved by the development of footpaths and cycleways. The tourist industry has perked up the commerce - even if the restaurant trade has become tediously uniform and greedy.
Prices are high or silly for meals out. The beef is still tough and tasteless, the lamb stringy. Fresh milk is at last reasonably available but ordinafry cream is still rare (not that we do not like creme fraiche; it just ain't the same). Loire wine is essentially insipid due mainly to the range of grapes grown (honourably excepting Muscadet, some Touraine Sauv Bs and a few others I cannot afford!).and the sandy soil. Everything improves on the edges of the Loire basin of course where some better limestone drainage helps the vines struggle a bit more.
June 15 - The campsite we are on is a classic bit of good and bad. Generous sites and some good shade cannot really make up for the rather tired (our end of the site) sanitation, the
total lack of a proper vidoir for the chemical loos and the provision of one washing machine for a site with 150 emplacements! But we get 10 amp leccy so not all is lost. Of course
getting a peg into the sand and gravel soil is a joke but then few others have our sort of awning!
Tomorrow is Orleans and the weekly shop - did some today at a small market in Jargeau. But essentials, gas etc means a grim day in Carremarche or Interclerc or something on the outskirts
of Orleans. That'll be after we see the centre ville and what is reported to be a disappointing city.
