Walk with me

Up at 1000 feet where we wake our heads are in clouds that condense into tears on our faces. But Accolay, where we start walking, is only 360 feet above sea level and the clouds here are resolved into plaques that shade from white to gunmetal grey. The sky is like Navy camouflage but despite the predictions, it isn’t raining.

At the edge of Accolay is a giant, dirty white pierced vase. It stands more than 12 feet high and is explained by a panel describing the arrival, in 1945, of three avant-guard ceramicists who built a trade here that flourished until the early 1970s. Then it died and the alarming, angular, fading concrete structure out on the main road turns out to have been their shop rather than a petrol station; now long relinquished to weeds and urine.

We pass on the left a gracious Belle Époque villa with a baby pigeon loft at the bottom of a field. It is one of those French manor houses that you long to own and renovate until you realise it sits inches from a main trucking road. Across that road, we start a slow, steady climb up a dirt farm track between fields of young oats. The air pressure is heavy but it is warm, 12ºC, and I feel dozy. A cuckoo, a falcon mewling, a patch of coltsfoot each rouse me momentarily. Then David, a few paces ahead, cuts short an exclamation, and I stride forward to look. A long, thin shape snakes across the path in browns and yellows, but its edges are ruffled. A sloughed snakeskin? And yet it is moving. At the second blink we see it is a caterpillar train: twenty-eight identical caterpillars each an inch or so long, feeling their way nose to tail across the stones of the path. Occasionally one slows and breaks the chain, but it panics to catch up. I’ve never heard of this behaviour yet it makes sense: from the air the tiny creatures will look like a snake, far too large for a blackbird or starling to tackle.

Further along, we see for the first time low purple flowers with bright yellow centres. The leaves and buds remind me of poppies, but the flower petals are pointed and protective like a bell – a kind of anemone, know here as “barbe de chèvre”. It is still before eleven, but with the gentle climb I am already warm and stop to strip off a layer. As I do so, I realise we are back with the vines: a few small parcels here and there on the slopes, the southern edge of the Burgundy region.

Despite nine days’ break from walking our bodies have already found their rhythms: stride follows stride, the poles swinging our arms forward with each step. We can scarcely walk without the metronome the poles provide anymore. At moments like this, when the ground rises, they lever us uphill just as much as they regulate our pace, keep us from slipping or channel the pack weight away from our backs. I see them in my view, as I see my feet. While watching out for stones and ruts, sometimes it seems our feet and the ground immediately around them are all we see of this trek.

We crest the hill on the pale track between low crops and pass alongside a wood. Relief! A place to shelter for a loo stop. Sometimes it’s not easy to be discreet. The heavy air is starting to peel back, too, and I feel fully alive to the views and the smell of apple blossom. But that doesn’t stop my mind wandering now and then to thoughts of last week and the visitors we had. There’s something about the constant pacing that mesmerises and lets the mind wander. I remember Owen waiting patiently for the red squirrel to reappear, and the faces of Charlie and Amelia as they run towards us full of their climb to the top of the Eiffel Tower. I wonder if they all got home ok.

A party of four older Germans are going the other way. In front, with a guidebook held like a shield, is a barrel-shaped man with a beard and a grey brimmed hat. They are all in shorts and look energetic, like gnome-scouts. They call out to us that Compostela is the other way. We laugh and call back that it is a long story …

We drop down through the neat edges of Cravant, a large village. We’ve seen the Romanesque arches of the tall church tower getting close, and now we can see the ornate carvings around those arches. Too ornate for Romanesque. Someone has given it a Renaissance going-over. But first there is a “lavoir” with considerable presence to duck into. Stone walls pierced with arches to echo the church, and the tricking of water into the large pool between shaded benches. From Normandy onwards, so many villages, even towns, have had their “lavoirs” – called “lavau” in the Morvan. Nearly all are well maintained with solid roofs, though I’ve never seen anyone using them. Now, for the first time, I grasp what a cool, shady place they must be to sit and chat on a hot day. Do people use them like that, for peace, shade and company? Or is the memory of the hard work they represent too strong a disincentive? The only picture I’ve seen of women washing clothes by hand was not in a “lavoir “but in a photo of the banks of the Seine in Paris, in 1956.

Cravant’s church is surrounded by the grass of a little esplanade with benches and pollarded trees. That’s how we know the village is more prosperous and proud than many we have seen in all these months. A grandfather is walking there with a child, and they wave to us. We pick our way through the village. It’s no wonder we wander in the middle of roads these days. In silent stone streets like these there are rarely any pavements and if there are, their twenty-centimetre width is occupied by parked cars. Away from the main road though, there’s rarely anything moving except us.

We decide not to stop at the advertised bar for a coffee, but carry on through the back of Cravant where two women with shopping bags stop their gossip to stare at us and then look away. I feel it is on their tongues to point out we are going the wrong way for Compostela. The red and white stripes of the Grand Randonée markings are on a fence post behind them, showing the way uphill past another church. The route has been well-signed today so far; there’s little need to study the map.

Like the other church – like most churches unless they are touristic highlights – this one is locked. We’re out of the habit of trying the doors of most churches; but just occasionally we do and are sometimes rewarded with the magic of some humble interior with mossy walls and dirty cracked tile floors, or sometimes a delicately carved capital or a gentle statue. In such places it is a parishioner who bothers to keep the church open, leaving fading notices in school-perfect handwriting to point out the aspects they are most proud of. If there is a box inviting donations for the church or for keeping it open, I’m so grateful I always drop money in. The boxes invariably sound empty.

This is a steep tail-end of a street and I’m conscious of my hip grinding as we go. But not too badly; it will probably wear off. And we quickly slant long and gently across the contours through more vineyards. We have the impression that vineyards are a meaner employer here. We see only three people working in the whole area, although they look up and wave to us. In place of people, the vines are brought to life by colour. Strips of fruit orchards alternate and scatter white blossom onto the brown rows. Between the rows blue is painted in by grape hyacinths, or pale mauve by alyssium. Even invasions of dandelions become attractive.

The day and the pace resolve into a succession of newly-blooming flowers that go beyond my knowledge; of buzzards hunting overhead and of butterflies. We take photos and leave the naming of them to research in books back home.

We’re still on chalk tracks, easy walking. After climbing steadily we level out and even drop slightly. We’re making a big loop around a hill called “Belle Vue” – a diversion from where we will end up, but the plotters of the GR obviously think the views will be worth it. And they are. The valleys on our left open out to the narrow plain of the weaving Yonne river below, studded by towns and the occasional smoke billow. Each hillside is a palimpsest of green, of orchards, vines and small woods. Now that all the trees are clad in a shimmer of leaf, we can see how each species has its own shade, height and silhouette. The fruit trees briefly make me think of the apple orchards below the Střahov monastery on Petřin hill above Prague.

We make a sudden turn to the right and after all that lazy gazing out into the distances my head goes down, my arms start pumping and my knee immediately twinges: it has seen the long, steep climb up the stony side of the vertical vineyard. I pant and I plod. Plod and pant. David is behind me, preventing me from slacking. Mid-pant, I reach and put on my sunglasses against the brilliance of the chalk. At the top, in a hollow of bushes, I wheeze and take a big glug of water. It is warm from my back, but welcome.

Now we skirt the hill on a narrow, winding path between scrubby bushes. The path is over-full of the white chalk stones cleaned from the fields. Our feet twist and tilt on them, bruised; and chippings work their way down between our socks and the boot leather. There are no vines here, just grass or plump green crops. I have a passing image of the North Downs Way, heading east. The land falls away on our left where the Yonne widens out into a marsh of small lakes, glinting between trees.

When the path leads down again we enter Irancy, a lovely small wine village concentrated in a horseshoe valley. It is less claustrophobic than the Champagne villages; houses have gardens, even courtyards that give glimpses of the family orchard beyond. Instead of dusty plaster walls sheer from the road, the buildings here are in stone with carved touches dating from Renaissance times. We sit in the sun on the Mairie steps to eat our sandwiches. Walnut bread and the tangy shock of Bleue d’Auvergne cheese. I drool with joy. An old woman leans out between her brown shutters, sees us and says hello. Stopped, no one can tell we are going in the wrong direction. Down the street a tiny poodle and a matching long-haired terrier cross and re-cross the stillness, kings of the village. After an apple, there’s the Restaurant-Bar-Tabac “Le Soufflot” to visit for a warming coffee and toilet stop. A buzzing place, it has a smart, glass-roofed courtyard where respectable people eat and a down-to-earth bar where we, dusty decorators and slick office-workers who drove up in sports cars are equally comfortable. The barman has pined up an email from a local off travelling the world. There’s a poster extolling the Irancy AOC wines, made from Pinot Noir grapes and two ancient local varieties, César and Romain. I like Irancy. I’d like to come back. It has beauty, it has some life. Or maybe it just has sunshine and coffee. As we climb out, we see the way it snuggles into its vines. Then we see an old wooden cart, once updated with rubber wheels but now abandoned. And we see orchids. Irancy is behind us.

Just before we enter a wood, two women and a child walk towards us, lean and fast. It’s ok, they’re not carrying packs; they can’t be pilgrims. But that doesn’t stop them telling us Compostela is the other way. This time David tries to imply we’re on our way back, while I just laugh and pretend not to understand. We’re too embarrassed to stop and explain the whole thing, so leave them with an odd impression of unfriendly ex-pilgrims, clearly unaffected by the spirituality of having once reached Compostela.

The greater part of today’s walk circles the heads of three valleys, tributaries of the Yonne. As the day grows and we tire, it helps us to imagine the day into thirds, punctuated by cafés, and therefore to pace ourselves. The second café is at Champs-sur-Yonne, just after we miss our way through an excess of enjoying the walking and peering at orchids. We earn an additional 2 kilometres along a busy road as a forfeit, so deserve a rest. The pretty café near Champs-sur-Yonne’s main esplanade is closed, without reason given. But at the back of the town is an ugly commercial complex, a concrete square of supermarket, DIY depot and carwash; and a tabac that is open. One of our faithful PMUs, with the usual silent bartender who is persuaded to serve us Oranginas and to point to the toilets. After walnut and blue cheese sandwiches, cold Orangina is my second favourite sensation of the day.

So far we’re lucky with the weather. The sky is full of clouds but somehow wherever we turn a channel of sunshine opens up to lead us through. Now we turn to the river and for the rest of the day we know the path will be flat. It’s an actual riverside walk, not one that hangs above the river on a cliff. There are chalets and cottages on our other side, tree-shaded and dishevelled in their overgrown gardens. One is new: we eyeball a glass wall through which we can almost stroke the lacquered doors of the fashionable kitchen.

At Vaux our luck changes. The clouds close over and remove our energy source, while the river is impassable. The bridge is a-crawl with workmen, netting, dust and sparks. We think about blagging our way across but see it is too dangerous. If we were in a car we could follow the diversion, but no one thinks of walkers, so the end of the day is a foot-mashing six kilometres along roads. We’re tired now, coming up to twenty-five of what ends up being a thirty-one-kilometre (or over nineteen miles) walk that has included lots of climbing. It was only meant to be twenty-four kilometres in total, but we’re too tired to figure out how that happened. I switch off and retreat into myself. It’s all about slogging it out to the finish now, like the ends of so many days are. Just getting it done, getting there, fills my thoughts. ‘There’ being a shower and a bed to stretch out on. Even when there’s a chance, today, to go back onto the riverside path from the road, we’re too tired to bother at first. The ill-named “Rue de l’ile de Paradis” squeezes us between a building site and the railway, while angry Doberman dogs stake us out.

And then, just at the end where we succumb once more to the river path, a final reward. We see a different side to Auxerre from the medieval cobbled city inside its wall that was closed and silent on a rainy Sunday afternoon. This Auxerre is a city of football practice, of joggers and cyclists, archery and canoeing clubs.

A record day for length and almost for ascent, and although tired we’re not too beaten up. But I can tell I will regret this evening staying in a cottage with stairs.

Day distance: 19.3 miles / 31.1 km
Overall distance: 801 miles
Time walking: 6 hours 16 minutes
Average speed walking: 3.1 mph
Total ascent for the day: 1437 feet / 437 m

22nd April 2008