Day 4 - Ancient and Modern

It’s nearly seven o’clock as I roll down the main street of Ducey, an unfeasibly straight road that I can see heading west for miles into the coastal flatlands of Brittany, where Mont St Michel stands in the distance, back-lit and spiking the sea horizon.

The centuries flash past – Ducey’s modern outskirts, where recent bungalows have filled the gaps between cottages, the mid-20th Century clustering around the round-about at the top of town, then the 19th Century on the straight high street, and increasingly ancient as I descend the hill. Finally, at the river, I reach late medieval, the stub of a chateau and some smart manorial outhouses.

They are collected around a bridge, three hefty stone arches that were once a main crossing point into Brittany. A lorry thunders past – evidently it still is. Modern engineering may have taken the major roads closer to the sea, pillared above the coastal meadows, but in the time of young Lawrence, this would have been the main road.  

Just before the bridge I turn left to my hotel. The Auberge de la Sélune is itself a combination of ancient and modern. Its foyer sits in a construction, glass hovering in a web of red ironwork between two traditional stone buildings, river glinting in the middle distance, beyond the garden. As I head upstairs, the corridor momentarily shouts mid-century boarding house, but once ensconced in my room I relax into modern style - the sleek feel of brightly coloured, striped wall-paper and neat woollen throws. Curtains, blankets and wall-paper are decorated in parallel lines of scarlet and biscuit, or lime and teal, or lime with fuschia.

After a shower I sit on the bed, drawn and exhausted. Not so much that delicious sensation of being physically used; this has a slightly grittier edge to it. I know that if I allow myself to lean back I will fall into the sleep of the drugged. It has been that sort of four days. Normandy has been quite a long way to ride – around 80 miles a day – racing between the stops at TE Lawrence’s sites to write endless notes, take photos and film, and then in the evenings, trying to think, to fit fleeting impressions into coherent patterns. I continue to sit, slack-jawed, mind in neutral.

But two things penetrate the mental fug. And you’ll have to bear with me on this, please – when not delicious, physical exhaustion can be a little delirious. The first is so wonderfully weird that it leaps into a new dimension of surreality (does the word even exist?). The box of tissues, on the desk, has a cloth cover that transforms it into a miniature sofa. No… But yes…! There it is, a tiny settee, lime green, suitably sized for a recumbent mouse and so unbelievably kitsch as to be admirable.

I decide to honour it immediately. Hey, my gps has also been working hard – the poor thing even suffered an ontological breakdown two days ago - so it shall be accorded the benefit of the comfort.  I plug it in so that it can recharge electrically as well, and then let it recline, in pride of luxurious place, on the mini sofa.

The second thing I notice is my muscles, which are itching oddly, creeping under my skin. Even sitting is strangely uncomfortable, not because of any strains or pulls. There is a weird rebelliousness about them – my trapeziuses (trapeze-ei?) and latissimusses are fidgeting and scratching, my hamstrings and quads are in near riot. It feels as though an angry octopus has got under my skin.

It is 7.30 pm and the sun is still warm. Perhaps some gentle use will make them feel normal again.

For all the confident straightness of the main road, which strikes through the meadows to Brittany like a lance, the gentle section of river that it crosses tells a more relevant story of Ducey. Clearly the stream has been meandering happily here for millennia. Just a few metres from the main road I am in a quaint, quiet section of town, built of the same ancient, chunky, mid-brown stone but older, and now by-passed in so many ways. There is an arched washing house, now covered and supporting a small car park, there are river-front houses, a mill house turned hotel, all centred on another, more ancient stone bridge. It all centres on a tiny weir, which gives a soft wash of white water.

Even here the centuries are jumbled: shoe-horned in between ancient buildings are newer blocks, though even these are old. Others have uncomfortable restorations bolted onto ancient fabric. It’s pretty, but does nothing for my discomfort. I roll my shoulders, trying to shrug away the itch... Not even remotely satisfying... I repeat the action until I realise that I look like a man possessed, alone on a pavement, preparing for a boxing match. I force myself to relax. And soon, in my befuddled state, my attention fixes on the small curtain of white water. A minute later I conclude that a man mesmerised by water is about as useless as a man with uncontrollable fidgets. It’s time to return to the Auberge.

A garden terrace overlooks circles of lawn set in sumptuous gravel and bordered by roses and other flowers. Beyond a stone wall is an island and then the river itself. Just the occasional, dull metallic thump reminds me of the main road. I order a beer.  And continue with my calisthenics as unobtrusively as I can: crossing my legs, scrunching up and leaning forward intently into a book - really stretching my legs and back. And then checking around me before reaching out with all four limbs, as though riding an imaginary motorbike from the 1970s (you know, those easy-rider bike with their ridiculous handlebars).

At 8.30, in the golden light and the last of the warmth, the high clouds are suddenly sliced by black flashes. Birds, darting with joy, twisting and rolling, tumbling on the wing, dipping over water and soaring around the steep Norman roofs and mansards, singly, in pairs and threes. I wrack my exhausted brain for a name:

‘Ah, mais Msieu, des hirondelles.’

Of course, how could I forget such a lovely word? To us they’re swallows. And I head in to dinner. Time to fit impressions into coherent patterns. And perhaps some sustenance will diminish the octopus’s anger. In fact perhaps I should even order octopus in revenge.

Day 4 - Green Routes or Voies Vertes

My route on Day 4 looks a bit curious on first inspection. To begin with it heads pretty much south-west, and then at a town called Domfront it turns due west: two sides of a triangle... I don’t question it at the time, but the reason becomes clear at Domfront. I find myself joining a cycle route, or as they are called in French, a voie verte, or ‘green way’.

For obvious reasons, we… Well, largely our gps cycling apps… have a love affair with cycle routes. Ineluctably we are drawn to them. In most ways cycle routes are a good thing: they are safer because they protect us from the traffic, and usually they are more pleasant because they take us through deep countryside. Usually they are literally a green way.

The route west from Domfront, like many of the cycle routes in the UK, has taken up a disused railway track - and what was a quiet, underused branch line even in the Nineteenth Century by the look of it. This one heads into really remote country, linking hamlets and farms rather than towns or even villages. And like all railway lines it is flat - trains just don’t like a hill – so that’s a small boon. There’s no climbing at all.

The going is slightly slower than on roads for other reasons. Gravel, dog-walkers and ‘furniture’ - mainly metal barriers that force a bob and a weave as you cross a road - mean that you’re quite often slowing down, but pleasant they are, surrounded by fields, woods and meandering rivers, with shade from trees that now line the old track.

And so, in the light-industrial outskirt of Domfront, I join the Voie Verte du Bocage. At the junction there are even a couple of helpful signs to fill me in on the local cultural and natural life: Patrimoine – megaliths, a medieval city at Domfront itself, manor houses and an 11th Century abbey whose influence stretched as far as England all those centuries back. And then the Produits of the Terroir – apples and pears, mainly, and Calvados and Poiré.

Cider and Calvados (its fortified equivalent) are pretty well known in Britain, but the word poiré has just a tiny echo in English nowadays - in our ‘Perry’, if you’ve heard of it – the drink made from fermented pears. It isn’t drunk much any more and then probably not outside Hereford and Worcestershire. But it gets serious treatment hereabouts. About a dozen of the 30 varieties of pear grown in the region are used in it apparently: picked very ripe, crushed, fermented and distilled in a column still, which produces 70% alcohol. Local Calvados even has an Appelation d’Origine Controlee: it should contain 30% pear juice in the mashing process before distillation. After which it should be aged in oak barrels for three years to give it its amber colour. Good to know.

Right, on we go. And, lid off. My helmet can swing from the handlebars for a change and the air can go through my hair. The hum of my tyres on tarmac changes to a gentle crinkle and scrunch on the fine gravel and raw pebbles. I hear birdsong. Around me is elderflower, even unexpectedly some bracken. And in the bottom of the valley, insects hover, jiggling with brownian motion, in any patch of shade.

My lunch stop is on a bridge across a river. I have been waiting for a bench, but there has been none for a while, so I lean against the old stone parapet. God this is bucolic and beautiful. The river beneath me is mid-whiplash, but the water itself is moving leisurely, lazily along. In the distance a farmer is working: the low grumble of his machinery snarls and grinds  as he reverses and turns.

I mentioned in passing that this is the Voie Verte du Bocage. Eventually it will go out onto the coastal flatlands, right to Mt St Michel (a great favourite of the young TE Lawrence), profuse green land is all around me: the pastures and the copses and coverts, hedgelines and thickets, rolling hills and streams. I have a limited tactical sense, but I can see that this would be awful country to advance through, expecting from every bush and corner an incoming volley of fire.

It is hot work, despite the shade. I come to a farm. I ask for some water.

“Of course.” The farmer nods, and points at a tap.

I make a silly gesture about it being hot work. He looks at me knowingly. A master of laconic communication, this one:

“Humide, Msieu.”

I cycle on, passing a former railway station, marooned now in time and function, what are left of its platforms now given to grass. And gradually a notion creeps up on me. It’s too quiet. I am not absorbing enough from endless hedges and embankments. I am missing the road: the houses, the shapes of the orchards and life in the gardens. Road-signs? Well, yes, them too, with their teasingly evocative names. What on earth goes on in a place called St Hilaire du Harcouet? Not much, as it turns out, of course, but there’s only so much countryside inactivity one can take.

So at five pm, as the sunlight starts to turn golden, I find myself sitting in the main square of St Hilaire du Harcouet, under the awning of a café, with a coffee and a flagon of water, map on the table in front of me, and I scope out a route across country, loosely following a river valley. The river is the Selune, on whose banks I will be staying tonight in Ducey, so surely it will be a pretty ride.

How wrong you can be. The river seems impossible to pin down. Each time I take a turn in the hope of following it I end tracking back, confused or confounded… into a municipal dump, the storage depot for local council machinery (is that a stack of snow-plough blades?) and an impassable bridge being mended… Am I being sucked ineluctably back to the cycle path?

In fact I end up on the main road. Oh, well. It’s quicker. And, unexpectedly, enticing - as I summit a gradual rise above Ducey, the view carries all the way to Mont St Michel, 15 miles away. The Mont was a favourite of the young TE Lawrence and it really is spectacular, looming in the distance, back-lit by the afternoon sun. But that’s for tomorrow.

Day 4 - Diverging Routes

It is in Falaise that my ride diverges from the route taken by the young Ned Lawrence and his father in 1907. They went west to Coutances, from where Lawrence senior took the ferry to join the rest of the family on holiday in Jersey. (I shall be tracking south and west to St Malo, via Mont St Michel.) The moment he was released by his father, the young Lawrence of Arabia set off on his own, on a long and rigorous physical challenge, naturally. To the Loire, some 200 plus miles to the south.  It was another foray into the freakish physical endeavour that became a hallmark of his later life. We know this from his letter from Evreux:

“I am thinking of leaving Father on the 20th or so, and going South to Fontrevault. The trip would take me about 8 days, and I would call for letters at P.R. [Poste Restante] St. Malo. These letters would tell me whether you were continuing in Jersey, and if it was worthwhile my coming to meet you there. I could then return to England direct, if inclined or wait a week in Jersey.”

But what of Falaise and its famous castle? They lie on the direct route between Chambois, whose castle he had photographed on this trip, and Coutances. So why on earth doesn’t he mention them in his letters? The idea of him NOT going there, to the birthplace of William the Conqueror and a fine medieval castle in itself, is preposterous. However, it’s also true that the last week of his trips are often left undocumented in his letters. Basically he was a diligent son, making sure to write to his mother each week while away, usually on a Sunday. (See more about the young TE Lawrence’s letters.) But we know from a later letter to his father that he found letter-writing a chore. So in this case his rationale was probably that because his father was about to rejoin the family in Jersey they could find out anything they were inclined to ask about their ride together from him. However, despite a map (drawn later showing that he passed through the town), he left no evidence that he visited Falaise on this trip.

I shall ride to the Loire later. For now, I pedal into Falaise. The sky is resolutely grey, a leaden blanket that makes the air humid. Before visiting the castle I am hoping to meet a local chef, but when I arrive at the restaurant a few moments before 10am, I can feel a current of confusion fizzing around the foyer. I announce myself. There is fluster, some quiet conferring, and a demurral. “Ah, bah, M’sieu…” 10 o’clock will be im-possible. “Desolée…”. Would I be pleased to come back that afternoon, after the lunch service, when the chef would be delighted to spend some time with me?

That seems rather a nice idea: I picture a glass of Armagnac and a congenial chat about regional culinary specialities. But… but…  By 3pm I must be most of the way to Brittany... There are 75 miles to cycle to tonight’s accommodation. Sadly I must turn the offer down.

Instead (after a visit to Falaise Castle) I have the delights of the open road. Aaaaah! It’s easy to underestimate – particularly in writing after the event, and in the winter as opposed to summer – the sense of release and freedom, the raised spirits, of riding off into unknown country. There’s a flood of feelings - the excitement, curiosity and nervousness, of not quite knowing what lies ahead, underpinned by the sensations of the body working away, being used as it should. And all in a setting so different - the sights and smells of fresh grass and even farmyards, the boom of bees in hot pockets of air and the consistent, Pavlovian ticking of my derailleur. As I leave Falaise I laugh out loud at the very idea: this is energising, liberating, fist-shaking joy.

Until I arrive at the bottom of the first hill, that is, where I realise what this unknown country involves. No longer is there the easy progress of the Norman plain, with its elegant and gradual solutions. Here the land is cut and jumbled and steeper. The slopes are wooded, strangely dark in the absence of sun.

There is stone now too… replacing the timber-frame and brick houses. And it’s not even the creamy, easily-worked limestone of Caen. This has an orangey tint of iron, and it looks gritty, like sandstone. The ruddy colour and greenness in the lack of sunlight makes the whole countryside seem spooky, almost dark and satanic (well, it does feel a bit deepest Devon and Dorset, as I mentioned).

And the cloud cover refuses to break. The air is still and wet, making free-wheeling feel cold, particularly after a sweat to climb a hill. As I broach another eerie slope, it starts to rain. I struggle into a hamlet, Foret d’Auvray, and there, just as it begins to sheet, is a… well, I am not sure what it is. It looks like a double market building, open-sided and tile-roofed, but it is unnaturally low, laid out with benches and tables rather than stalls for selling things. Is it a market for midgets? Or are they fanatical backgammon players? Or is it a ‘sitting’ market, where negotiation is taken so seriously that they take a chair and settle in? Or perhaps it’s for community lunches… No idea. However, it is very convenient as a shelter for a cyclist avoiding the rain.

Thirty minutes later I find myself in flatter country soaking in the landscapes of rural Normandy once again: fields of tousled grass sectioned by hedges, an ancient pond with a small communal laundry building, cottages crouching in the folds of the land and in the villages ‘Mairies’ standing proud, breast-beating and neo-classical. Quite a few animals start as I pass: a fox, eyes darted over his shoulder as he lopes away, then a hare that races from a hedgerow, cantering in urgent curves.  And as the sky seems to have disgorged itself of rain; the cloud finally breaks and the sun appears among high cumulus clouds.

And then a kestrel rises and flies alongside, tracking me for 150 yards, gliding above the hedge to my left. Oh, I know he’s hoping that I‘ll disturb a smaller field animal that can become his prey, but I enjoy it when a bird does this. And I know that my critical faculty becomes a little fanciful at moments like this - it’s one of the mental side-effects of prolonged exercise - but I love the idea that the bird heralds a presence of a different kind. In normal life I am not a superstitious person, but my father and then my mother, shortly after their deaths, did appear to me as crows (to get the full irony of this, you’ll have to read Christopher Moore’s Coyote Blue, a very fine and very silly novel). So might this small bird of prey flying alongside me be TE Lawrence himself, accompanying me for a while, to check me out or to offer some small companionship in our mutual journey…?

Day 3 - All Roads lead to Le Sap

So I leave Evreux for the second time and, via the complicated squiggle of cycle path and river-, rail- and main road-crossings, I end up back in Glisolles, where I look in at the mairie to say thanks, but they are on their lunch-two-hour. Finally the day gets into gear and I emerge into open country: fields slide by, my first orchards, isolated farms in ‘style normand’… The route climbs, but not quite onto a plain. Here the land is more broken: rolling, dipping into broader valleys, descending sunken lanes. There are still wooded gullies to cross, but the roads tend not to take a leisurely path through them.

However, there is the bucolic idyll: it is a rich green land that has been husbanded for a thousand years. And there is silence, broken only by the buzz and boom of insects and the ticking of my derailleur. By midday it is hot, even in the breeze of forward motion. If the weather in August 1907 was like it is today, I pity Thomas Lawrence, TE Lawrence’s father, forced on by his son, on a bone-shaker of a bicycle and presumably on terrible gravel roads. No wonder his neuralgia was threatening to play up.

I descend for a wooded kilometre, arriving in the delightful La Ferriere sur Risle, which is alluringly soporific at one thirty on a sunny afternoon. It seems deeply traditional, with a higher density than elsewhere of half-timbered buildings; its main square is a sort of double width street spanning a market building. And of course it is completely shut up. I spin gently across to the river Risle, where the water runs fulsome with weed between banks overflowing with reeds and grass. And, suddenly, in the car park of the inn on the corner, I stumble on a 24-man lunch: one long table with twelve country men faacing one another each side, not a woman among them. A farmer’s convention? No, surely they’d be far too busy at this time of the year. I wave and one or two wave back, but they are focussed, determined on life’s pleasure, not yet leaning back expansively in their chairs.

Back up high ground, the land is sparse and empty and encouragingly flat for a while, good country to ride, but hot. In search of water and a snack, I pause in La Barre en Ouche… Also completely closed up: the lacklustre Tabac offers only Orangina. Anything to eat? My eye drags over some little plastic packets of coffee biscuits? We stumble politely: he doesn’t really want to give them away and I don’t really want them anyway. A lollipop…? Thirty minutes later I decide on a stop at the roadside. On a section of grass I spend a happy ten minutes glugging my second Orangina.

But it comes to every cyclist: I must carry on, into the jaws of inevitability. And today, all signs are pointing to a village called Le Sap… I even muse on the name before I arrive. What could possibly go wrong in a place with a name like that?

Well, nothing, to begin with… I ride gently through the central square - really a car park with traditional market building on one side and a chemist, the pharmacie, a café, shops on others and what were once the village’s prestigious homes - I scan the outer streets, looking for more to drink and, yes, a boulangerie for a pain au chocolat… when Bang! There follows a hiss and periodic dabs of pink milk along the broken tarmac.

Huh, no problem. I know all about this… I set myself up on the ancient stones of the pillared market building and begin what I hope will be a near-theatrical performance, with a flourish here – position the wheel on an ancient stone step, whack! and the tyre comes out of its rim, to be removed with aplomb. Then, magician-like, my spare tyre and tube materialise in my hand and slither into reassembly… tube threading into tyre, tyre onto wheel, all ready for air and a clunk as the tyre fits in place…. Except… hold on... Where’s the blinking valve? Ah, it’s too short…

But hah! I have a special extender… Except… that… it… won’t… stay… fixed… when I screw on the pump… What?! How can this be? Who would design this? Why were the doughty men of Decathlon not fazed by this problem? Sap, I say to myself.

I need a tool. A delicate spanner…. of the sort, aha… that a chemist… who might also double as the local optician… might easily possess. I make my way across to the Pharmacie… and stand politely in the doorway, wondering how to translate “specialist miniature spanner” into French. I wait… patiently… and wait...  politely… and eventually I give up. Even after 15 minutes, the two people behind the counter are still serving the same old lady. Village life, eh? I know I’m in lycra, but I didn’t realise I looked that mad. And anyway, I thought that the French quite liked cyclists.

So I head back to my bike and brutalise my fingers for the second time that day. And just… just manage to get the valve in place and fill the tyre with air. It clunks happily home into the rim. Done, but I must stand up and admit that for the second time in a day I am the man who only just managed to mend a puncture…

Day 3 was always due to be long, but after two punctures and a detour of idiocy I still have fifty kilometres to cover and the heat is already draining from the afternoon. And there’s the third of TE Lawrence’s castles to visit. I head out and immediately I am held up as a dairy herd is coaxed across the road. Till the cows come home, eh?

“Allez les filles…! Hop!”

After racing 25 kilometres, I skitter down into a broad valley and there it stands, a huge beautiful, cream-coloured, recti-linear block overlooking a stretch of village lawn. Chambois Castle.