Lavardin : le château fort

Peintres amateurs, photographes, Lavardin vous offre un sujet de choix : comme une estampe romantique les ruines de son château féodal... dominent l'un des plus beaux villages de France...

That's the Michelin Guide Vert's introduction to the village of Lavardin in the vallée du Loir, near the big town of Vendôme.

I've been there a few times, starting in 2001. Some of these pictures are from that trip. It was about then that Walt and I started seriously thinking about a move to France. Then we went back in 2004, on a nice day at the end of January, when we were spending our first winter in Saint-Aignan. We had cabin fever and just needed a nice outing, so off we went.

The old château's ruins really do loom over the town, and have been looming for nearly 1,000 years. The Loir river valley and the comté de Vendôme are a place where the old kingdom of France, based in Paris, collided with the Anjou territories of the Plantagenêts. Battles ensued, and fortresses were built. This photo and the two below (taken by Walt) are from our 2004 visit.

The donjon, or castle keep — the tall, blocky tower — actually dates back to the 11th century, according to the Michelin Guide. It's 26 meters (85 feet) tall, and over the centuries was closed in by three different sets of walls. Of it, Michelin says: Bien que très endommagé, ses ruines impressionnantes permettent encore de se faire une bonne idée... of how forbidding the whole complex must have been.

The château de Lavardin was captured by the protestant King Henri IV in the late 16th century, when he laid siege to what was a Catholic stronghold. At that time, the dismantlement of the old fortress began. The locals used the ruins as a quarry where they could mine stones to use in building their houses and barns. It's an old story, often repeated in different regions of France.

To show you where Lavardin is located, I did a screen capture of a Google Map and added some hot-pink dots showing the location of Saint-Aignan and of the famous tourist town of Amboise. Lavardin is 40 minutes by car north of Amboise, and a good hour's drive so from Saint-Aignan. Vendôme, Blois, and Tours are the big towns in the region.

Lavardin (part 2)

This is the second installment of my photos of the painted interior walls of the Saint-Genest church in the village of Lavardin. Here's a link to the first set of photos. The village is on the Loir river, which flows parallel to the wider and longer Loire river at this point, about 35 miles north.



The paintings date back to the 12th century and on to the 16th. They were covered over with whitewash or limestone render in the 17th century and remained hidden until the early 20th. Lavardin, a village over which looms the ruins of a medieval fortress castle, is one of the Plus Beaux Villages de France.

Peintures murales à Lavardin en 2015

It's hard for me to believe that it's been five years since I was last in the little village of Lavardin. It's a very picturesque place in the valley of the Loir river (no E, it's le Loir, a smaller river, not the much grander Loire) between the towns of Vendôme and Montoire, about 40 miles (65 km) north of Saint-Aignan and a 45-minute drive from Amboise. Lavardin is one of the 150 or so Plus Beaux Villages de France and is the site of the ruins of a medieval château-fort. CHM and I drove through there in June 2015 and stopped to take photos of the wall paintings inside the village church.



I posted these photos back then, but not in the form of a slideshow. Here they are, or at least half of them. The show runs for 2½ minutes. I'll make a slideshow of the other half of the photos for another day. The paintings date back to the 12th century and on into the 16th. In the 17th century, they were covered over with a coating of limestone render and remained hidden until the beginning of the 20th century. They are very colorful and well preserved.

Memories of bread-baking

We still haven't been able to buy any yeast, be it dry, instant, active, or fresh "cake" yeast (levure en cube). Every time we order groceries from one of the two local supermarkets, we order some. And every time we drive to the supermarket to pick up the groceries we've ordered, we're told there is no yeast available.

I really shouldn't complain. The four or five local boulangeries are open and selling really good bread. Even the supermarkets sell really good bread nowadays. It's baked on the premises from dough that's probably made in an industrial bakery and probably frozen for delivery to the stores. That's okay with me, as long as it's good to eat. And it is.

Still, it's fun to bake bread. We still have flour, salt, and water. That's really all you need, plus yeast. Making a loaf of bread or a batch of rolls is very satisfying. It passes the time. And it's fun to eat good bread and think to yourself: C'est moi qui l'ai fait! — "I made that!"

These are some rolls or petits pains that I made on April 22, in pre-yeast-penury days. I made them with all-purpose flour (French type 55) because that's what I had at the time. I'd like to try making them again with bread flour, but without yeast it's not possible of course.

Sourdough. Maybe I should try to get a starter going, but apparently the process takes a week or more. It's not something you can be spontaneous about. Actually, I'm not even sure I like sourdough bread all that much. Here, by the way, is the YouTube video that inspired me to make the rolls in these photos back in April. It's time to place another on-line order for groceries. Maybe they'll have yeast now.