Chambord: architecture out of control

The Loire is tourist country par excellence. Every house with a turret or a classic al facade seems to have turned into a must-visit chateau, with a special attraction such as a waxwork museum or a hunting museum or a museum of nineteenth century cutlery (I think I’ve invented that one, but it certainly might exist), and charging ten euros admission, and absolutely thronged with tourists.

You can get away. Jacques and I wandered the woods behind the chateau of Chenonceaux, alone in the moist warmth with the smell of decomposing leaves and the sound of a desultory breeze in the branches high above. At Beaugency, we found we were the only people in a deserted town, except for the lady in the boulangerie who sold us a baguette, and the artist dozing in front of his ‘SPAM ART’ exhibition who hailed us from his camp bed.

But for the most part the Loire is fixed up, parcelled out, sold up.

Some of the chateaux are quite pretty. Some are really rather surprising. Some are just plain dull.

But Chambord is something else.

At Chambord, what we see is not in fact a chateau. It’s just a hunting lodge. A hunting lodge, mind you, that is bigger than most of the royal chateaux.

Francois I took twenty years to build  it, and then spent fewer than 35 nights there. It’s a triumph of architectural splendour over real function.

Its geometry is clear – a square castle with four corner towers, based around a Greek cross plan of axial corridors, with a spiral staircase at the centre. Each quarter of the castle is built in exactly the same plan; each set of apartments is exactly the same (with one exception, the little oratory built on to one of the towers). This should be the triumph of reason.

But it’s not. The exact repetition makes it impossible to remember where you are; you get confused, bamboozled. The staircase is a double spiral, and it seems to act as a sort of randomiser – you can never quite remember which arm of the staircase you took, so you’re never sure where on any given floor you will come out.

And the place is huge. It’s like a giant’s castle, the ceilings high, the rooms massive, the walls thick. (Each apartment is completely separate, built into the thickness of the walls.) Francois in the end forsook the central block to move into the more intimate, more usable space he’d had built in one of the flanking wings. You can’t imagine it in use; the court only camped here, with folding beds and chairs, and was never in permanent residence.

Later, in the 18th and 19th centuries, some of the rooms were subdivided and refurnished – but they don’t seem to manage to overcome the brooding bulk of the chateau, its overpowering architecture.

There’s something completely out of control here. Architecture has grown like Quatermass; it’s created an environment, but not one for living in. Within, it’s austere, rigid, classical; on the roof, exuberance breaks out with turrets and lanterns, chimneys, pinnacles. You could imagine yourself in a French Renaissance village up there, with two-storey houses perched on the roof, and the central lantern over the staircase like a perfect circular church tower.

Chenonceau is lovely, but it’s human in scale. Blois wears its grandeur on the outside, but inside is an intimate place. But Chambord is like Gormenghast – it’s a castle that has sucked all the life out of its inhabitants, and become a living thing itself. And not, I think, a completely benign being.

The unexpected

I’m just reading an intriguing speech by Philip K Dick on the building of science fiction universes. It’s replete with a range of references from the Bible to the pre-Socratic philosophers, and one of these in particular caught my attention;

“If one does not expect it, one will not find out the unexpected; it is not to be tracked down and no path leads us to it.”

It’s a lovely paradox. It’s particularly true of travel. Some people go to the most surprising places and never experience the surprise, because they are not open to it.

The ‘fat white woman whom nobody loves’ doesn’t experience the vastness of the desert, but the sand getting in her hair.

I found a most surprising experience last week, in the Loire valley. I’d gone to look at chateaux – I ended up listening to cajun music at a village fete, the Stuffed Tomato Fair in Rilly-sur-Loire, eating salmon-stuffed tomatoes, and admiring the Honda motorcycle lovingly created out of choux pastry by a local patissier.

(Why stuffed tomatoes? Because they grow tomatoes in greenhouses nearby.)

Welcoming the unexpected is about noticing the little signs that tell us there’s an adventure down this road. The poster for a local fair, the busker playing a tune you recognise from somewhere, the procession heading down a street (it might be a jazz funeral or a fourteenth July procession, like the one I saw in Blois featuring fifteen fire engines)…

But if you don’t expect to find the unexpected, all you’ll find is what the guidebook tells you.

Another little brag

Not really so much a brag as just a link to a site that I did some work for a while back – Morocco Gateway.

Tim Evans, who runs the site, gave me a very clear brief – it’s aimed at travellers who don’t want to do a boring if-this-is-Tuesday-it-must-be-Marrakech escorted trip, but who aren’t completely go-it-alone adventurers. ‘Safe’ adventure, or adventurous tourism, whichever you want to call it. We evolved a number of ideas for itineraries, which I’ve written up to try to give a feeling for the whole experience of travelling in Morocco – rather than trying to ’sell’ any particular destination.

If you click on ‘articles’ you can find my articles, written with my partner Jacques Combeau who is the real expert. (And also the guy who got hit on by touts all the time – his temper being much more equable than my short fuse!)

Wow!

I’ve just heard that a piece I wrote has been shortlisted for the Bradt/Independent newspaper travel writing prize. That’s rather a thrill so I thought heck, let’s brag about it on my blog.

The piece is here; it’s about one of the strangest towns I’ve ever visited, from my trip to Morocco earlier this year.

And now back to reality; I have painting to do after having my bedroom redecorated.

Visions

I saw visions today.

I think I saw an angel.

A man lying on his back in the grass, and the sunlight caught the grass so that it shone and glittered with gold, like a halo.

Willow trees shimmering like gold leaf, so thin you can move it with your breath.

A pale blue sky with broken clouds that seemed to recede as I ran towards them (though I know, really, it was only an optical illusion caused by my more rapid progress towards a tall chestnut tree).

And last night, coming back home about ten as the sun fell, a pair of paper hot air balloons rising into the sky (itself just that rich purple velvet before full darkness comes), the tealights making them glow richly as they swooped upwards, taking the light breeze to the west.

I’d been wondering today, after reading Tracy Chevalier’s Burning bright and blogging about the Blake exhibition at the Tate, how William Blake could see the ‘chartered streets’ of London as angels.

And now I know.

Colours of English May

The colour of May is white.

Drifts of poplar or willow fuzz on the grass by the river Wensum, like a late snowfall. The white of hawthorn blossom in the hedges, with its heavy smell, like lily scent with an undertone of sex or decaying fish. Cowparsley, with its tight heads of off-white flowers, already a yard high.

The daffodils are gone, their heads drying into faint brown ghosts of flowers. All the vivid colour of March has disappeared, and there are only scatterings of white like confetti at a spring wedding.

Smells of home

The palmeraies of Morocco sometimes remind me a little of the oases of Oman. But one thing is very different; the air. Oman has a dry spiciness that makes my nose prickle; Morocco’s air is softer, less pungent.

Few travel writers are much aware of smell. The smell of a latrine, the smell of a good meal, perhaps; but the hints of ozone and salt in sea air, the smell of decaying seaweed on a beach, or the smell of dry earth when the rain hits it – those are so often forgotten.

I was reminded of that out jogging this morning by the Wensum. As I ran over Whitefriars bridge, I smelt soggy cardboard, a smell like that evil glue on old envelopes when you’ve just licked it, warm and wet, the effluent from the packaging factory. And I realised, for me, that’s one of the smells of home.

When I was a child in Ipswich I loved passing the Pauls maltings, for the rich, sweet smell of roasting cereal. It was like breathing in a Christmas pudding. That smell, alas, has been chased out of the docks by commercial development. (A malt floor is an amazing place; hot and wet like a rainforest, with a moist breath that blasts you in the face when you enter, and the fulness of the aroma. You shiver when you come back out, even in the middle of summer.)

You can even smell the weather, and the season; the grassy smell of spring, the heavy, almost rotten smell of hawthorn in a good May. Hints of woodsmoke in the air herald the winter.

And the other smell that lets me know I’m home; warm cat fur…

A baby sister for Chartres cathedral

We didn’t mean to find a cathedral. We were only looking for an ATM.  Jacques had run out of money, and we needed a bank.

But as we drove into Gallardon we realised we had found rather more than just a branch of Credit Agricole. A fine Gothic choir and a marvellously high spire, and a strange, huge, relic of upthrust wall crowning the hill, gave this town a striking silhouette against the low spring sun.

As soon as we saw the apse of the cathedral I knew where I’d seen it before. The flying buttresses, simple buttresses like semi-circles drawn with a child’s compass; the simple, wide lancet windows, without tracery; it was exactly like Chartres cathedral.

The silhouette of the church is as striking as that of the town. The choir is gloriously high; the spire, at its north west corner, soars up to heaven. But the whole thing seems to be cut short. Then you realise the nave is there, after all, but it’s so low its roofline is hardly visible above the houses of the town.

We went in, of course; after all, the church was next to the bank.

Even with that hint of Chartres cathedral I wasn’t prepared for what I saw inside. Beyond the long, wide, rather low nave, steps led up towards the glowing light of the choir; the bleached white of fine, porous limestone. It was like a path of revelation; through darkness to light. I had to raise my head to look at the choir; the whole church is laid out on the slope of the hill,  rising and rising again towards the east. It is an amazing place.

Of course, the effect would have been rather different had any of the original stained glass been left in the choir windows. The clear glass floods the apse; it was almost as if the light had become tangible, so strong did it seem.

And a baby sister for Chartres? Well believe it or not, I was right.  It was built around the same time, and even the stone used to build the choir may have come from the same quarry, according to a note in the church.

Noises of home

I had a strange experience in the orchard today. I walked out, in the early evening, and the plum tree blossom was drifting slowly down, and the tree was humming.

It was the bees. When there’s a single bee near me, I can hear it; the individual quality of its buzz is clear, as if there’s a tiny silence between the infinitesimal moments of sound. It has a definite pitch, a definite texture almost.

But when there are so many bees, their sounds all mingle together into a huge hum, like the aftertone of a peal of bells, or a roomful of Tibetan singing bowls. It was magnificent. The sound of a French orchard in April.

Where does it change?

I’ve taken to using the Norwich-Cambridge-King’s Cross rather than Norwich-Liverpool street connectiion recently, since it gets me directly to Eurostar, even if it does take a bit longer. And looking out of the window, I’ve been wondered; where does Breckland end, and Fenland start? Where does the landscape change?

Breckland is unmistakable. Scots pines stride across the landscape, straggly lines, their branches akimbo, gaunt and angular trees. Heath and furze and huge arable fields give the land its texture; there are dark pine forests, work of the Forestry Commission, and open cornland, patchworking the landscape.

Then coming towards Ely there is the fen. It’s not the flatness that always amazes me, though true, it is flat; it’s the blackness of the soil. Not dark brown but absolutely black, velvety black like a pint of Guinness or a pair of black suede gloves. It’s a hard land, the wind keens everywhere and the air is cold; but the soil is luxury compared to the sand of the Breck. Telegraph poles march across the Fen, but while once they were uniform, neat and pressed, now every other one leans one way or another, out of true, out of line, out of kilter. Lonely houses stand in their tiny patches of green, not pretty cottages but foursquare boxes, four brick walls against the immensity of the sky and the force of the wind.

The train and the river run above the fields, embanked, embattled. This was sea once, and the land doesn’t let you forget it. From time to time it floods, and the fields are silvered or mirrored over with the inundation, and you feel as if the train is chugging on an embankment through an inland sea.

But where does it change? I’ve never managed to work it out. I turn my attention to the newspaper for a bare minute, and the landscape has changed already…