In travel writing it’s usual to talk about a ‘sense of place’ and the scarlet-flecked fields of wheat and barley shout Normandy: the blood-red specks are the horror still screaming from beneath the earth from World War II. But Normandy’s buildings speak louder still for the region. The area has a distinctive traditional building style of ‘half-timbered’ walls. They are so essential to the place that the style goes by the name ‘style normand’.
The buildings are houses mainly, but also farms and cottages, and some townhouses and municipal buildings as well as barns and outbuildings. Rarely, of course, are they chateaux. The owners of a swanky new chateau would presumably have carted in stone, or built in brick and then rendered it.
The parallel and criss-cross timbers and rendered infill of French ‘colombage’ walls are not dissimilar to our Tudor style, of course. The timbers are the exo-skeleton of the house, and the space in between them is filled with a lattice of finer wood which is then sealed with torchis, our ‘cob’, clay mixed with straw, or sand, even manure. A render can be applied on top, sometimes covering the timbers, but usually leaving them visible. There are a million variants – some beams are crossed to give an X pattern but most stand simply in vertical lines, some painted black with white render, others natural wood with cream or brown; bricks can be used as infill between the timber spars.
I find myself passing these half-timber buildings at every turn, their striped patterns calling to me from across fields and gardens. Four centuries ago they must have been quite a statement, but with age comes a rust of authenticity and now they feel perfectly part of the environment and landscape. It’s a slightly strange feeling - of being drawn to something which itself is a sense of place - but these distinctive buildings give a joy to a ride through Normandy.
And then I stumble into Rouen – briefly I wonder why, perhaps my GPS has found a novel entry, along another storm drain, into the region’s biggest city… But like any city, the small country road on which I arrive soon turns into the arcade of post-war light industry, much of it dying, with gaping windows and empty courtyards festooned with weeds and broken tarmac.
“Someone is practicing the organ - agonised blasts emerge, every few seconds. Either their frustration is telling or it’s a score of surreal music.”
Beyond here, I reach the Nineteenth Century city and decide I should try to organise some accommodation for tonight, so I pull into a pretty but echoing, almost empty square. A line of old merchant buildings – in style normand naturally, but in browns, pink and yellows - runs down one side and on two others are small municipal buildings. I sit on some steps, bike leant on a bin, my back to a church. It is early afternoon and the square is quiet: occasionally a person will walk from corner to corner, on their way to somewhere else. In the church, however, something is afoot: someone is practicing the organ in their lunch hour (or is that ‘lunch-two-hours’? This is France, after all). Their efforts emerge, in agonised blasts, every few seconds. Either their frustration is telling or it’s a score of surreal music.
I have been given a phone number, for a hotel in Lyons la Forêt and I stumble through in my best French, never a good start in a negotiation:
“Do you have a room for tonight? How much would you charge…?”
“I have a studio, with a kitchenette and a nice view over the square… at …. Blllaaaaannngggg…!” A brassy chord barrels out of the open windows and rolls over my shoulders, obliterating any sense. Goodness knows what my collocutor thinks; the noise sounds more like a foghorn than a church organ.
“Sorry, but do you have just a room, perhaps a single?”
“No, only a studio… I can let you have if for…. Thrrrooooonnngggg!!!!”
This could go on for hours. In the end I just say yes.
I set off through the countryside, up the hill into suburban Rouen, and out into the high farmland again, trying to get the measure of the villages, some clustered, some ribbon devlopment. Two men are building a bonfire, for the 4th July celebrations.
I arrive in a village, Azouville-sur-Ry, and find myself drawn to yet another building in traditional style normand. It’s tiny, like a Norman bus-shelter, really. On investigation it turns out to be a 14th Century bread oven. Ok, this style normand thing has gone too far.
Instead I realise I am on a circuit of Flaubert highlights. It’s turning out to be a bit of a literary tour, this. Well, we are in France. A sign-board proclaims a Promenade du Pays d’Emma Bovary (Flaubert’s lumpen anti-heroine who he never gave a single break from her desperation and dissatisfaction). Flaubert came from Rouen and it is supposed he might have hiked through the area. This village was famous for its leather water spouts for barrels…
Fifteen kilometres farther on, having clocked up 125 kilometres for the day, I come to Lyons la Forêt, the location of the accommodation I am pretty sure I have managed to book.
Lyons la Forêt is what it’s like when style normand goes to town, so to speak. It has the same chocolate box effect as the Cotswolds, though instead of the honey-coloured stone there is a riot of pyjama-striped houses. It has been a popular tourist town for a century now, which has led to larger, more elaborate buildings – the most fanciful of which has come out in a flourish of turrets. And, as it turns out, another was used as the backdrop for a film of Madame Bovary.
An Apology: James Henderson has been in his trackies, ie ill in bed (that and gardening are the only place I ever wear track-suit bottoms), and so has not been able to add to this journal on time.