I am a little lazy this evening. I have been taking longer and longer bike rides lately and planning out trips with local maps. I found a reference to a Merovingian Era Cemetary outside the village of Louignac a few weeks ago and being passionately interested in vestiges of that era, the early middle ages, I began researching a trip.
Today was perfect, a little hot, but I left about 11 am and rode to the village of Coubjours, which is at the limit of the Dordogne and crossed over into the department of the Correze. It's quite hilly here and as you head east, the hills get bigger, but when I turned off of the D31, I headed straight down hill into a region called the Basine d'Objat. The Basine is a long valley that extends for perhaps 30 kilometers, threading its way between the hills. Many of the bigger villages are on the hilltops, but some very important old places are along the small rivers and streams that thread their way through this lush agricultural and forested region.
Around 1:15, I made it to Louignac, then found the dead end road out of town that went to the Merovingian site. When I finally found it, I was pretty unimpressed. It was more like the place that the stones for the graves were quarried from and if you didn't know what you were looking at, you would never know.
I stayed about a half hour then headed back to Louignac. When I got back, I decided to investigate the church, L'eglise de St. Julien. It was a curious structure, as I looked at it, I realized that it was a very old romanesque structure from the 12th century and it had been modernized around 1900 with the rather bizarre cloche.
Entering, I was taken by surprise by the baptismal font. There was a paper under plastic on the wall by the door that stated that it was definitely from the pre Merovingian era...it was a surviving object from Gaullic Roman France. This doesn't surprise me. My local village, Badefols d'Ans has been around since before 600 ad and the church, l'eglise de St. Cloud was supposedly founded by a son of Clovis. The present structure was built in the 11th century.
So, by this time, it was getting pretty hot, around 30 Celsius and I had a long uphill ride no matter which way I decided to return. I was able to fill my water bottle and I took off for Villac. Here is a picture of the 12 Century church in Villac, where
incidentally, one of the very best local boulangeries is! Then, uphill, out of the Basine d'Objat through the cool forest road and I was home by 4. It was an adventure and the mysterious baptismal font of Louignac kept me occupied for a while as I tried to find out more about it. I still actually had enough energy to take the dog for a hike, make guacamole and barbecue hamburgers. My wife made dessert, a creation called Framboises en neige......Raspberries in snow!Perhaps I will post the recipe tomorrow...it was incredible.
It's raspberry season here again and I have more than ever.
Today, I picked over 2 kilos!
2 comments:
Raspberries won't be ready in my yard for a few more weeks, I'm afraid.
It must be exciting to live in a place with such deep history, Microdot, especially of the architectural and archaeological sort that you can actually touch and smell.
While Ohio has a rich history before the French and British, most of it is lost, with the exception of a dwindling number of oral histories. We do have a few sites like the national park set up as a monument to Hopewell culture, but Europeans had a nasty habit of destroying native artifacts, often believing them to be demonic, so much material history of the original peoples of the continents is long gone.
Anyways, my wife and I are touring the Iberian peninsula in late July and early August, and I hope to steep myself in some of the rich history of the land once known as al-Andalus.
Again, Microdot, you whet my appetite to come to France and live! Thank you for posting this day-trip; what an exciting day from your house to the 12th century and earlier.
Have you deciphered the inscription on the baptismal font? Curious to know what it says.
Adieu.
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