Just a few kilometers up the Loire and the gorge from Retournac, the town I posted about yesterday, stands the 13th century Château de Lavoûte-Polognac. It's built on a rocky outcropping on the edge of a meander of the Loire just outside the village of Lavoûte-sur-Loire (pop. 850), just about 20 minutes north of Le Puy-en-Velay by car.
Walt and I drove up there from our gîte on my birthday, three days before we ended up in Retournac. CHM had told us about the château, so we wanted to see it. We were pretty tired after a long day, the day before, of packing up the car and then driving for about five hours in gusty and rainy weather to get from Saint-Aignan to our gîte in Le Puy. We got these views of the place from the opposite bank of the river.
Une voûte seems to be a local word for what is called une boucle or un méandre, describing a curve or bend in the channel of a river. The Polignac family, who had the château built, was a very old noble family in France dating back to the 9th century. The family line died out in the 13th century, around the time of the construction of this château, which is basically residential.
When we drove up to the château, hoping we'd be able to go inside, all we saw was a sign saying that it was closed for the winter. There's another castle, or fortress, in the town of Polignac, just a few minutes west, that's called simply the Château de Polignac. More about that one to come...
On our last day in the Le Puy area, we decided to drive up to the town called Yssingeaux (pop. 7,000). I had read that it was interesting as an example of a very old town in a remote area in mountainous country, and it's only half an hour's drive from Le Puy. Well, it was kind of a bust. Everything seemed to be under construction or restoration, with scaffolding and tarps on many buildings. It was crowded with people and cars, with no place to park the car, and the prospect of walking around it the town with the dog on a leash didn't seem attractive. So we turned around fast and just went driving. Walt looked at the map and said maybe we should drive down the gorge that the Loire River runs through as it flows north from Le Puy.
It was a pretty drive. The weather was cold and a little windy, so it wasn't conducive to taking a long walk on a hiking trail or along the river. Then we came to a town called Retournac (pop. 3,000), which I hadn't read about or even heard of. It's a town located on the banks of the Loire and it's also on the rail line that links Le Puy to the larger city of Saint-Étienne and on to Lyon, Paris, and Marseille. Retournac turns out to be a little mountain resort town where people come to spend their summer vacations hiking, boating, and relaxing.
I made nine photos I took there into the slideshow above. You can see the town and the river, the bridge across the Loire, and the town's at least partially Romanesque church, which is built out of what the Michelin Guide calls pierre d'une coloration jaune, with un clocher massif (a massive bell tower), and a roof made of lauzes — flat stones cut from sedimentary rock like limestone or sandstone. I pushed the door of the church open to see the inside, but it was very dark in there and a woman who was praying, I think, looked startled by the sudden light that shone in through the doorway. I quitely closed the door and moved on. The hilltop ruins you see in one photo are just outside of the town and show what is left of the Château d'Artias, which stands far above the river and is one of the oldest fortifications in the region. It was built in the 11th century and construction went on for 70 years. It fell into ruin at the time of the French Revolution.
Back to another subject: a couple of mornings ago, I was out walking Natasha when the little dog that lives three houses down came flying out of its owners' house, barking wildly. The neighbors' front gate was open. The young woman who lives there with her husband came running out behind their dog, trying to get him to come back into the yard.
We talked for a minute or two. She told me she is expecting her second child later this year. I remarked that her recently deceased next-door neighbor's house now has a for sale sign on the front gate. Yes, she said, I found the ad for it on the internet.
Do you know why the man's daughter and husband burned so much of his furniture when they cleaned out the house? Yes, she said, I talked to the daughter and asked her. We were very shocked by that incident, she added. The man had a nice house with a lot of perfectly good pieces of furniture. I agreed. I asked her what his daughter had to say about it all. The young neighbor woman (I don't even know her name — French people often don't share that information) said the explanation was that the daughter and her husband didn't want to have to make a lot of trips over to the déchetterie (the dump/recycling center) to get rid of everything, so they just burned it all.
All the neighbors I've talked to about the way this was done have expressed shock and dismay, remarking that with so many people in need, why would the family decide to burn everything? Why didn't they run an ad, open up the house, and just let people come and get what they wanted or needed? Sometimes it's hard to understand what people do, and why.
Here's a long-zoom shot of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame du Puy-en-Velay and the huge Notre-Dame de France statue that stands on a big rock behind it. We walked up to the cathedral but decided not to go up to the top of the rock to see the statue up close. The zoom lens can do that for us. Besides, we were walking around with the dog on a leash.
Different web pages about the cathedral in Le Puy say that the number of steps you have to climb to get up to it is either 102, 117, or 134. Truthfully, we drove up and parked in a lot that is not all that far downhill from the cathedral. The weather was nice on that Thursday morning, March 7, so it was a pleasant climb. It rained in the afternoon, so we were glad we had gone up there early in the day.
In this longer view, you get a better idea about the cathedral and the statue in their dramatic setting. On the left, you can see the other major "perched" monument in Le Puy. It's the Chapelle Saint-Michel d'Aiguilhe — Aiguilhe (pop. 1,500) is a separate municipality that lies north of Le Puy proper. Aiguilhe is an old or dialectal spelling of the work aiguille, which means "needle." The chapel sits on a needle of rock left over from an ancient volcano.
The photo above sort of stretched the capabilities of my little camera's zoom lens. In other words, it's "soft" or blurry. But it does show the relative positions of the statue, the cathedral, and the chapel. The "needle" is 82 meters (269 ft.) tall, and the first chapel on top of it was built in the 10th century.
Here's a long-zoom shot of the Saint-Michel chapel. For people younger than I am, I'm sure it would be interesting to climb up there to see the Romanesque chapel and amazing views of Le Puy and the surrounding landscapes. The whole urbanized area is pretty amazing for a flat-lander like me, who spent his younger years on the sandy North Carolina coast and then on the central Illinois prairie.
The gîte (vacation rental) where we stayed last week in the Auvergne region was actually located on the territory of the big town called Le Puy, which is the chief town in the Haute-Loire département. We were on the far south side of the town, in a rural environment. Still, there was a Casino Géant hypermarché and a big shopping center with a range of stores and businesses (a Darty home appliance store, a garden center, LIDL, a Décathlon sporting goods store, a McDonalds, other restaurants, etc.) just two or three kilometers away.
Here's what the neighborhood looked like. I think you could call it un hameau (a hamlet). That's a settlement with its own name but no church, no mayor, and usually no shops or stores. This one did have an auto-repair shop and a meeting hall called l'assemblée (salle des fêtes or salle polyvalente are other terms for such a building). The photo above shows you the hamlet. I'm looking north sort of toward Le Puy from high ground above our gîte. After I saw the landscape from this perspective, I wanted to go up to the highlands across the way, where some of the land is forested, as you can see. And we did.
The road into the hamlet, le chemin du Riou, is a dead-end road about a kilometer (half a mile) long that runs from a main north-south highway down into a deep, narrow valley, and then up a hill on the other end of the valley. To me, it's what would be called "a hollow" in the Appalachian Mountains in America. In the first photo above, you can't actually see our gîte. But in second picture, you can see it as my camera did from across the way, from a distance of a couple of miles. The dovecote wasn't hard to spot, and our gîte was right behind it. Here's a picture of it Walt has posted.
The highlands across the way gave us a view out over the town of Le Puy (pop. less than 20,000). This what I wanted to see by going up high. From the gîte, we didn't actually have such a view. In the background, you can see the cathedral and the statue of Notre-Dame de France standing on a huge rock. I'll be posting a lot more photos of Le Puy and surrounding sights. Click on them or "unpinch" them to see them at a larger size.
