shewhomust | Entries tagged with gr65

Among the many fragmentary travelogues in this blog are a sequence of reports from stages along the pilgrim route to Compostela. But I'm always aware that this description is liable to misinterpretation, and try to spell out the many ways in which I am not a pilgrim. If sometimes I seem to be protesting too much, consider this article from Saturday's Guardian Travel: Actor-turned-travel writer Andrew McCarthy explains how he accidentally bought and read a book (this one, though he doesn't name check the author) about the pilgrim route and "something about the author's tale of his modern-day pilgrimage spoke to me. I was looking for something, I just didn't know what it was."

And two weeks later, wearing new hiking boots, he is crossing the border into Spain. Plenty of warning signs here: the new boots (yes, they cause him problems and yes, he abandons them and is happier: but unless I'm missing something, this is presented as evidence of suffering overcome rather than folly learned from), the starting at the Spanish border (sweeping generalisation: people who see the Camino as an interesting historical route start in France, people who see it as a personal challenge start in Spain).

( Behind the cut, I get in touch with my inner bitch. )

So far, so irritating. But oddly enough, the phrase that made really cross was the apparently straightforward: "by the time I strode into Santiago in late July..." The feast day of Saint James the Apostle is July 25th: it's a fairly big deal in Spain anyway, and on the pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint James, immeasurably more so. Did he stride into Compostela in time to celebrate the saint's day, or was he too late? We aren't told, we aren't supposed to be interested, what matters is how he felt about himself. This isn't travel writing, this is self-help.

Thank you, I feel better for getting that out of my system.

The three pilgrim routes across the Pyrenees meet at Puente la Reina. But just before we got there, we came to Eunate.

( Eunate )

From here it was no distance at all to Puente la Reina - where Queen Urraca built a fine arched bridge at the end of the eleventh century. The road west enters the town through a narrow arch and - as the Calle Mayor - runs straight between imposing buildings, sheer as cliffs, to the bridge.

( Puente la Reina )

When we had admired the bridge from all angles, we drove on through the late afternoon heat, through Navarra and on into La Rioja. The dusty fields of stubble were dotted with squares of vines or olive groves, the patches of green becoming more and more frequent until the area under vines was continuous, ringed in the distance by the improbable silhouette of mountains muted by the heat haze.

After a couple of days playing truant from the Camino de Santiago to explore the vineyards of Rioja (more about this later), we have rejoined the pilgrim way at Santo Domingo de la Calzada, where we are staying in the second parador - and by some distance the grandest hotel - of our trip.

I had thought that the pilgrims had reached saturation point at Puente la Reina, where the different routes across the Pyrenees meet and pour their travelers in a single stream across the north of Spain. But Santo Domingo owes its existence to the pilgrimage, and doesn't forget it.

Domingo Garcia (Wikipedia entry) lived in the eleventh century and devoted his life to helping pilgrims on their way to Compotella, not by the usual charitable supply of food and shelter, but by improving the condition of the route - the calzada - itself, building first a wooden bridge, then a stone one, and paving the road surface. A settlement began to grow around his hermitage, and in time that became Santo Domingo de la Calzada. There can't be many towns whose involvement with the tourist economy is at once so ancient and so evident. And we are staying in a hospital (or hostel - I'm never sure, in the middle ages, how distinct these two things are) built for pilgrims in the twelfth century, and now a four star hotel run by the Spanish government - there's a fine sense of continuity in that!

We went out this evening to stroll round the town, thought we might as well look round the cathedral (of Santo Domingo, of course) and ended up spending so much of our time there. As well as the cathedral itself, with its elegant vaulting and some fine stonecarving, and all the richly decorated shrines, and the tomb of the saint himself (which is where this portrait comes from, showing him accompanied by the miraculous cock and hen), there is an exhibition of medieval polychrome statues which I found unexpectedly fascinating - and just when I thought we'd come to the end of that, we reached the Chapter House, with its painted ceiling and collection of treasure, case upon case of medieval bling. There was also a gothic arch, gated with iron bars behind which a piano lurked in a niche - presumably a piano which needs to be caged is even more dangerous than a book which must be chained).

All the time we were in the exhibition we kept hearing sirens, and half expected that we would emerge to find the town up in flames: but eventually we found the funfair where the local police were offering the kids motorcycle rides round a marked course, sirens sounding and lights flashing.

We seem to have booked ourselves a holiday. We've been plotting it for a little while now, but all the pieces have fallen into place, we have had confirmations from all our chosen hotels, and today Amazon delivered the road atlas - so it must be happening.

Kindly disregard anything you may have heard me say earlier in the year about going to Scandinavia. we were very tempted, and we may yet go and visit some of the locations of the crime fiction

durham_rambler enjoys so much. But we cooled towards the idea when we realised that there is currently no ferry from Tyneside to Scandinavia, and the journey would involve travelling south before we could go north. Eventually, if we must we must, but for the time boing we are sulking.

After that we tossed a number of ideas back and forth, and they all sounded fun, but there was nothing that filled us with "Of course! That's what we want to do!" Until I was leafing through the Britanny Ferries brochure, and found right at the back a few ferry plus hotel packages in Spain: including one which they described as the Camino de Santiago.

Over a number of holidays we have actually walked (almost) the GR65, the long-distance footpath that follows the Chemin de Saint Jacques, the pilgrim route from Le Puy in the centre of France down through the Pyrenees at Roncesvalles. And we'd always told ourselves that one day we would carry on across the north of Spain to Santiago de Compostela, only maybe - probably - not on foot. From not having thought of that particular trip for this year, I switched in an instant to cetainty that this was what I wanted to do.

We haven't bought the full Britanny Ferries package, which seems more concerned with booking you into the paradors with which they have an arrangement than with following any historical pilgrim route, and certainly doesn't share our passion for completeness. We have put together a mixture of their ferry crossings and those hotels where they offered a good deal, some paradors booked through their own central booking system (which gave us a much better price except on the one that we hesitated over and then decidd to indulge ourselves) and one small hotel which we have booked direct online. I couldn't have done it - neither the planning nor the booking - without the internet.

Broadly, the plan is to sail to Bilbao, drive back into the Pyrenees and pick up not the 'Camino Frances' which we had been following but the 'Camino de Aragon' which crosses the mountains further east. We head west in a leisurely manner (we've allowed ourselves a couple of days in La Rioja) to about the midpoint of the Camino, then turn and head for the coast, with another couple of days in the mountains, just to have a look round.

In a month's time I will be in Spain.

This year's holiday plans are firming up nicely - as they should be, since we set off tomorrow week. Meanwhile, I continue to find things in the Guardian travel supplement - in among all the 'wild horses wouldn't drag me...' suggestions - which seem worth noting for future reference.

Last Saturday brought a new suggestion for a trip which we have actually contemplated: the Spanish section of the Camino de Santiago, by train: we've walked - give or take, over a period of time - the route through France from Le Puy to the Pyrenees (and

durham_rambler has completed the last leg from the pass down into Roncesvalles. And I'd love to see some of the locations along the Spanish, route, not to mention Santiago itself. But the more I read about the route through Spain, the less inviting it sounds: packed with walkers whose motives are either heavily spiritual or hard core athletic, and for much of the way either seriously challenging walking or too close for comfort to major roads. But narrow guage railway could be a fun way to travel (the railway's web site is in Spanish, and worse, it's heavy on the animations; Explore - or possibly, Explore! offer a package).

An earlier article about destinations near ferry ports recommends the Wadden Sea - with islands! - (via Esbjerg). This was new to me, but the description sounds good: Denmark, seaside, islands. Poking a bit further around the internet identifies the Wadden Sea as that coast of Denmark that faces the Channel, and the islands as the Frisian islands, which sounds more familiar. Still looks good, though not necessarily better than a seaside holiday in Britain...

There is a certain compulsion which is prevalent among walkers; they cannot see a stone without feeling the need to place another stone on top of it. Cairns grow at path junctions and on summits, but also at apparently random points. Few are as evocative as the inukshuks described in this post by

tamnonlinear (thanks to

matociquala; and don't miss the pictures!), but they do inhabit the landscape, and provide a fixed point on which to take compass bearings.

In the department of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, columns have been set up every few miles along the Chemin de Santiago. And passing walkers have clearly suffered the impulse to balance stones on top of them.
( More of this - with pictures )
These three images - the column and the two crosses, the two piles of stones and the wire draped with bright scraps of cloth - keep rearranging themselves in different patterns in my mind, pulling in different associations (I haven't even mentioned the Tower of Lives from Chaz Brenchley's Books of Outremer, for example). I try to arrange my pebbles in a logical pattern, but all I can do is gather them together, do my best to balance one on another.

We walked, in the end, from Aire sur l'Adour, in the Landes (40), to the chapel at Olhaïby in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques (64). But these names and numbers represent the modern map of France, the departmental system codified after the Revolution; we walked from Gascony, through Béarn into the Basque country. And of these three, it was Béarn that was the surprise.

Wikipedia sums it up: Béarn is a small territory, tucked into the Pyrenees and their nothern foothills, wedged between France and Spain "comme un pou que se disputaient deux singes (like a louse between two monkeys)" according to its king Henri d'Albret.

Through the middle ages, it preserved its independence, despite falling by inheritance into the hands of one lord after another: Gaston Phoebus paid homage to the French king for his county of Foix, but refused to do so for Béarn; later it became the property of the kings of Navarre, across the Pyrenees in Spain; even when Henri of Navarre became Henri IV of France, Béarn remained a separate kingdom which shared the same king as France. One result of this delayed unification with France is that Béarn was not bound by the edict that laws should be passed in French (i.e., not in Latin; but also, not in the local language) and continued to legislate in Occitan until the Revolution.

It's farming country; in late May, the wheat was high in the fields, but maize was still being planted (we had the impression that, day by day, we could see it growing). It was hay-making season, and tractors roared precariously across small fields at odd angles on hillsides. There are cattle (the coat of arms of Béarn is two red cows on a golden background) and vines. The farms are large, stone-built houses with slate or tile roofs, facing the farm outbuildings across a shady courtyard. And I'll let Elizabeth David tell you what they eat in those farms: ( but behind a cut, because this is long enough already )
Not to mention the towns with their medieval churches or sixteenth century fortifications, perched high above fast-flowing rivers of blue-green water from the snow of the Pyrenees.

Long-distance footpath number GR65 runs from Le Puy in the centre of France, south and west to the Pyrenees, and over the pass of Roncesvaux into Spain. It recreates the main route taken by pilgrims heading through France to the shrine of St James at Compostela in north-west Spain.

( Two reasons for walking it, neither of them mine )

Not me; I'm just on holiday. I enjoy seeing the country close-up. And I admit that I enjoy the historical associations of the route, the sense that for hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, with all their mixed motives and different modes of travel, have travelled along these paths or others nearby. I enjoy, too, the physical evidence of their passage, the pilgrim churches and hostels, the evidence of place names and scallop shells and statues of Saint James (usually depicted dressed as a pilgrim, that is, someone making a pilgrimage to his own shrine, which is only odd if you stop to think about it). And on a hot day, it's pleasant to be welcomed by the shade of an old barn to which the villagers have contributed cast-off furniture to provide an informal shelter, or the water-tap on the corner of a lawn, against which the owner has propped a scallop shell as an invitation to the thirsty.
( A couple of pictures )
And I suppose that if I feel welcomed by these things, then at some level I am, after all, including myself among the pilgrims.