Knock-knock-knock-knock-knock…
Pierre-Paul Riquet was having a bad night, as he tossed and turned…
Louis XIV was his patron, although he doubted even the Sun King’s sponsorship would alleviate his growing debts – debts that had now risen to a level he knew he would never be able to repay.
It was all down to an obsession, no, the obsession – to connect the waters of the Atlantic with those of the Mediterranean via a unique feat of French engineering; a canal running right through the Midi of glorious France…
But there was a problem, a problem that threatened to wash away all the engineering success of the past ten years…
Knock-knock-knock-knock.
There it came again in his fevered mind. Always the same, always the metal hand with the five finger knocking on the door inside his tormented head…
We left the Hotel Peculier, in Bézier, with mixed feelings. It had been an excellent and stylish home for two nights; two nights in which we had got to know Bézier a little, and recharged our batteries for the longest run of the trip – to our final destination, Sète. We were nearing the end.
We also knew that the countryside between Bézier and Sète was, to be frank, pretty dull.
The Canal du Midi flows all the way to the Mediterranean but the major activity, nowadays, is holiday boating. And most of that seems to be west of Bézier. 
But the design goal of the canal, built during the reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King, was to connect the Atlantic to the Mediterranean Sea for the purpose of ferrying cargo; and to provide an economic spur to the hard-pressed people of south Languedoc.
Knock-knock-knock-knock…
Pierre-Paul Riquet, French Baron, Salt Tax Collector, risen to King’s Engineer and now entrusted with his own obsessive vision, turned over in his sheets and stuck out his hand so that it caught the shaft of moonlight coming through the shutters on that hot August night in 1679. He dragged the fingers of the hand so that they moved along the sheet in parallel, creating a wave in the pale cotton…
In a second he was wide awake. The five finger knocking in his head had ceased… He knew what to do…
Approaching the tiny hamlet of Vias, we were able to see the work of the Sun King’s Engineer up close and personal…
When two waterways intersect, they have to go over or under each other. They can’t simply pass through each other like a road system does. Water doesn’t know how to wait – unless you make something very strong to force it!
To get the canal to the sea, near Sète, Pierre-Paul Riquet had to make the Canal du Midi and the fast-flowing river Libron ‘intersect’. They were at the same level in the landscape, so an aqueduct was out of the question.
Riquet followed his silvery vision and, using a combination of heavy ironwork and railway components, constructing two giant sliding hands that would stop even the frequent flood waters of the mighty Libron…
Today it is one of the historic wonders of the engineering world and is called Ouvrages du Libron. Most people pass it by without even knowing its significance. Without it there would be no Canal du Midi.
Beyond Vias the landscape changes, becoming very salt-marsh based. There are camping and chalet-centric holiday parks and an increasingly complex road network. You can feel that you have entered the flow of holiday traffic.
Four kilometres from the sea, the pleasant town of Agde lies on the estuary of the river Hérault, one of southern France’s major waterways.
Tired from the heat, we entered its sheltering streets, found a quiet and shaded spot on the waterfront, and had a light lunch.
We knew we were on the last leg of the whole adventure, and there was a sadness as well as a sense of relief.
Lunch over, we cycled to the spot where you get the last view of the Canal du Midi, before it enters the sea, a few kilometres down the salt marsh.
We thanked it and gave each other a selfie kiss, before moving on…
There followed about ten kilometres of small roads. Then we entered the outer cycleways of Sète and got our first view of the Mediterranean!
The final journey was along the spit that separates the town from its huge inland lake.
This narrow bar of sandy land contains an excellent cycleway, which lifts the spirits until you realise that it’s fifteen kilometres long…
By the end we were wilting, and ready for that long iced drink in the first cafe that emerged from the endless blue horizon…
They had an aerial photo map that showed the sheer extent of this lovely place, surrounded on three sides by the shining blue of the Mediterranean.
The top map shows our long approach down the causeway; the second shows the whole expanse of Sète, centred on its green hills.
We had cycled over two hundred kilometres in the searing heat, but we had eaten beautiful French cuisine along the way, and enjoyed new (to us) labels of Minervois and Corbière wines. We had stood in places of massacre and of engineering triumph. We had followed the Canal du Midi to the sea and had enjoyed its tranquil company – especially when it brought us shade…
Now it was time to say goodbye to two good friends that had carried us across the miles without even a puncture.
Later, walking along the quay in search of a final fish dinner, we passed a father and daughter sitting, enjoying the sunset. I asked if I could take a photograph. He smiled a yes and stood up to get out other way. I smiled and laughed that I wanted them both…
It sums up the modern, cosmopolitan South of France, really, that picture…
Thank you for riding with us! We hope you enjoyed the journey. We certainly did…
©Copyright Stephen Tanham, 2016.
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Bézier is a beautiful city. It was established five hundred years before the Christian Era and thrives today.
Roman amphitheatre excavated
modern Bèzier
It is also the city where in 1209 an entire population of Cathars and non-Cathars were put to the swords of Pope Innocent III’s Albigensian ‘Crusaders’, including Simon de Montfort, because of their strength of belief in a living Christ capable of manifesting in an individual’s life, rather than via a Church hierarchy.
For the Cathars to die as they did shows they had already found their answers.
It is not for us to judge, simply to reflect on their courage, and the value of the ‘truth’ they had found.
Modern Bézier faces its own challenges. It is a multicultural city in a hot place. It lives in an agriculturally dominated landscape, yet has technological ambitions. It is on the main route between Italy, the Côte d’Azure, and the Atlantic ports of south-west France and Basque (Catalan) Spain.
It is also host to one of the most important sections of the Canal du Midi – commemorated (below) in a famous painting to celebrate its opening in May, 1681 – over three hundred years ago.
The great architect of the Canal du Midi, Pierre Paul Richet, was a local man and is celebrated in a huge statue in one of the main boulevards.
The heart of the city is a place of contrasts. The scene of the 1209 massacre, the impact of the Cathedral of St Nazaire on the visitor is immense… And yet it is a place of obvious humility. Work on the building was begun in the eighth century.
The first thing that strikes you about the Cathedral is its accessibility. This was built to include people, rather than awe-inspire them. Of course it does both, but in a way that invites.
The famous rose window in the west, which sits above the huge organ, and receives then fading light of the sunset, is magnificent.
Christ’s baptism by John the Baptist
One of the most moving chapels in the north-west of the nave depicts the baptism of Christ by John the Baptist. It was key moment in the Christ story, and the symbolic acceptance of his mission is beautifully portrayed in the stance and the faces of the two men who knew well what they were doing, on both the spiritual and physical levels of their lives.
The beautifully vaulted main roof is exquisite in its detail.
The high altar is framed by the main east panel that is beautifully crafted in Baroque déco style and takes up nearly the whole of the Eastern wall of the building. It is too ornate for my taste, but I can acknowledge its finery.
The feature that moved me the most was a simple wooden arch, placed in the west, and nearly at the nave’s end.
This ‘doorway of mercy’ mirrors that opened by Pope Francis in St Peter’s Bailica and is fashioned around simple and inclusive proportions. The act of ‘going through the door’ invites us to unite the whole of our being in one, inclusive action. The arch represents the combination of three different geometric figures:
The rectangle is an elongated square – our physical nature: the earth, the place we find ourselves.
The four equal angles of the square/rectangle represent the four directions of our horizons.
Above is the arch, part of a circle, the symbol of the heavens, the spiritual world – not high above us, but just ‘above our heads’
You are invited to walk through this magical gateway, and I did, delighted to find these simple esoteric truths portrayed in a church, once again…
The exterior of the Cathedral is asymmetrical, and draws the eye to explore it.
The cloisters are one of the few cool places, and lead down to the terraced garden which overlooks the canal-housing valley below.
Our time at an end, we walked slowly through the ancient streets, happy just to wander and find shade where we could.
Thursday morning will see us on the road early, for the final and longest of our cycle rides – to Sète, our final destination, and, finally, the Mediterranean Sea…
©Copyright Stephen Tanham, 2016.
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It was hard to leave Narbonne. We had formed a very special bond with the place; but, we had another 50 km ride in front of us, one that would see us arriving at our penultimate destination – Bezier.
First, we had to retrace our steps back up the Canal Robine to rejoin the land of the Midi.
The few kilometres up to Cuxac D’Aude passed quickly. We are discovering a whole new set of muscles that endure much longer than the ones we had when we set out from Bram, so long ago!
Cuxac is not a pretty place, but we’d had to race through it the first time. Now, it was the perfect coffee stop for us to consult the map, as something rather special lay ahead…
Four kilometres later, we caught our first sight of the ruined abbey of Fontcalvy.
Established as a Cistercian religious ‘hub’ for a number of ‘etangs’ -local districts of agricultural value, it had flourished until the nineteenth century, when it was finally abandoned. It was given historical monument status in 1983 and is now a protected building.
Despite being a ruin, it has one of the most ‘alive’ feelings I have ever experienced. It touched me in a way I can only express in poetry, so I hope to do it justice in the near future…
Beyond the ruin lay a couple of small villages linked by some of the most delightful country roads you can imagine. There is just the sound of the tires on the hot tarmac, the breeze in the trees, and the colours of green, blue and the Sun’s gold.
Eventually, we reached the suggested lunch stop of Capustang.
This lovely and vibrant little town was, sadly, spoiled for us by an adjacent table of cyclists who were wining so loudly that we gave up after a hasty Croque Monsieur, called it a day and left…
But fate moves in mysterious ways and we were to make good use of our extra time at an unexpected engineering marvel a few miles along our route…
The Butte du Malpas is a small hill, barely fifty metres high, but it has a singular place in the history of civil engineering in the Languedoc region. The picture shows one of the larger cruiser boats entering the tunnel of the Canal du Midi.
What it doesn’t show is that, fifteen metres below that and at an angle of about sixty degrees, runs the main rail link from Bordeaux to Sète – our final destination.
And that’s not the end of the story…
Beneath the rail tunnel there is an even deeper one, the original, which is the drainage outlet for the nearby lake.
Poor Malpas hill has had more drilling than my teeth… But it is a worthy engineering masterpiece.
Just offset to the south of the crest of the hill is a lovely visitor centre which houses the model shown above. It was staffed by two of the most hospitable ladies we could have wished for, and soon, two hot and dusty cyclists were parked in the shade, drinking fruit juice, and sharing a litre of iced water… heaven!
The downhill run from Malpas saw us swiftly arriving in the canal pleasure-port of Colombièr, one of the few such modern sites on the whole of our route. The very air was starting to feel like the ‘seaside’; not surprisingly, as we were a mere few miles from a Mediterranean we were yet to glimpse…
Thursday’s final ride will fix that, as we end our pedalling with a glorious run along a fifteen km stretch of ‘spit’ that separates Sète from its huge tidal lake.
For now, the beautiful, Roman city of Bezier had come into view, and, after navigating some tricky construction work that had closed the canal path, we began a one kilometre ascent of one of its hottest streets to find our lovely hotel…
More tomorrow on Bezier.
©Copyright Stephen Tanham, 2016.
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I slowed to let the young lad on the bicycle pull out onto the roundabout. That looks like… I raised my hand to wave to my son’s friend and instantly realised my mistake. It might have been his son, but it certainly was not the boy I had known. It couldn’t be… he would be in his thirties now and this youngster was little more than a child. Even worse, he looked like my son’s best friend when we had first known him, almost twenty years ago, not as I had last seen him a couple of years ago, well over six foot tall and as broad as a tank.
Memory is a funny thing. I recalled a recent conversation where we had discussed how the images that we hold in our minds of people we know are not always accurate. Sometimes we picture them from a single moment in…
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What would you do if you were the Archbishop of Narbonne and you found yourself being made Pope?
You might consider honouring your former home by creating a new, gothic, cathedral – a very grand cathedral; one modeled on the splendour of those in Northern France.
In 1268 that’s exactly what Pope Clement IV did. He decided that it would be a monument made in the magnificent style of the Kingdom of France. He had plans drawn up and the construction began in 1272. The ‘choir’, the bit at the top of the calvary cross that all such churches were based upon, was finished in 1332, but the rest of the building was never completed. What you see today is as far as it got… the dark outline in the ‘wingless’ plan below.
This ‘grand cock-up’, as the local historians describe it, was the result of many things, including sudden changes in the economic status of Narbonne, the sheer size of the original design – which would have seen it span four city blocks- and regional economic issues.
But the biggest reason for the cessation of the construction was that someone worked out that they would have to demolish the city walls to accommodate one of the trancepts – the left side-arm of the horizontal part of the cross shape… Both trancepts have been removed from the plans you will note.
But the wingless wonder continued to crash. Over the next two hundred years the rest of the plans were gradually dropped, leaving the ‘choir’ as the only surviving part of the cathedral of Saint Pasteur and Saint Juste, as it became known to history – the Pope having, presumably disowned it by then…
But magnificent failures have much to teach us…
The good people of Narbonne took the residual ‘choir’ to their hearts and ensured that it would stand the test of time on its own terms.
When you are in the splendour of this interior space there is only grandeur and beauty, ‘box’ or not.
You may have gathered that we’re not cycling today.
We’re having a rest day in Narbonne, swapping further time in the saddle for a relaxed tour of this lovely and friendly city
The Canal du Rabine, which is a Narbonne spur from the Midi, runs right through the middle of the city, as the picture shows.
The covered market offers a wonderful glimpse into the lives of the people of the city, and how they shop and prepare their food
And then there’s the Roman Museum…
And frequent exhibitions, like this one on Australian Aboriginal art:
So, all in all, it’s been a wonderful and cultured rest day…
Tomorrow, back in the saddle and head down to Bezier! May it not be as hot as the Homps trip!
©Copyright Stephen Tanham, 2016.
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Inspired by an exhibition of Aboriginal art in Narbonne.
Image: Milky Way by Louise Numina, 1965
Native Australian Artist
—
And Life Shall Have Dominion
Whatever you can touch
You have dominion over
Whatever you can touch and move
You have power over
Be kind to it…
–
Whatever you can see or hear or smell
But cannot touch or move
Has dominion over you
Pray that it is kind
And knows love for what you
Could be…
——-
©Stephen Tanham, 2016.
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Blackie on her rounds. (Found at Mira Images)
They say that animals don’t “feel”.
Meet Blackie. At least that’s what we called her, as kids. It may even have been her real name, it’s been so long I’m no longer sure.
That’s Eddy Miller on his rounds with her. Hadn’t thought about Blackie for many years, despite the large part she played in my childhood, so imagine my surprise, if not joy, at stumbling on this image of her online!
She had been doing the job so long that she needed nothing more than the sound of empty bottles being loaded and she would walk, just as far as would be required to drop off the number of bottles in a crate, and stop, waiting patiently for the next chinking cue.
She knew every kid on the street, which ones would offer a rub, and which ones were most…
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Sunday morning are strange things on these trips. You set off from your auberge all kitted up like you’re off to the moon, and the first ten people you meet are sandal-clad, sleepy locals carrying their baguettes back from the boulangerie and looking at you in wonder… And who can blame them!
Sunday had dawned cool and overcast – it was wonderful. As our lovely Dutch hosts walked us out to the garage cum store room to retrieve the bikes, we actually felt a smattering of rain! They smiled at our pleasure – it would really have been a joy to have a cool day’s cycling.
The first few miles remained overcast and we revelled in the cool air. We knew it wouldn’t last!
Soon, we were back on a Tarmac road and headed for the midway point of Ventenac en Minervois. The afternoon would see us leave the Minervois wine region and enter that of Corbière. Both produce fabulous wines – as we had sampled in Carcassonne.
The majority of places we pass through are hamlets whose names are not readily discernible. Castles on the skyline tease with their presence. But to stop is to lose precious time – and the clouds were burning off, and that familiar prickling heat was returning, so the photos have to be the record…
Approaching the village of Paraza we had a surreal experience. A man and his wife were chugging along in the same direction as us. She was driving the boat and he seemed to be standing behind her gazing up at the sky. I noticed that his gaze was focused on what I took to be a bird of prey, but as we got closer I could see he was piloting a drone – very accurately – about a hundred feet overhead. It looked expensive and I assume had a good camera. In effect he was getting two views; one from the cockpit of the boat, and the other of the whole landscape on his colour monitor!
Paraza (above) is a beautiful village that we were sorry to have to cycle on past. After our humble bread and cheese roadside repast of yesterday, we had promised ourselves Sunday lunch in Ventenac…
And a couple of miles later, there it was:
But, of course, everyone else was out for Sunday lunch, too, so we had to settle for what we have come to call one of the ‘dusty cyclists tables’ out in the sun at the back of the place. The food was fine and a small beer each was all we allowed ourselves in the growing heat.
The afternoon saw a considerable change in the landscape. We had now swapped waterways, as the Canal de Rabine is a spur from the Midi to the once ‘coastal’ region of Narbonne; sadly, long silted up from its former Mediterranean connections.
The Rabine has long, straight sections which are a pleasure to cycle, as they are lined with local pine trees that offer good shade. The classic ‘Vincent’ cypresses having given way to the hardier pines as we approach the coastal lands.
Shortly after, the outskirts of Narbonne came into view and we wove a gentle path through its marina sections of the canal basin.
More on Narbonne tomorrow, including its very self-honest view of one of the greatest blunders in cathedral history “le cock-up”!
©Copyright Stephen Tanham, 2016.
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Dear to my heart…
This list comes from Kate Swaffer who after being diagnosed offers a fresh perspective on how to live beyond dementia rather than only die from it, and how family, friends and dementia care professionals can more positively support people post diagnosis to do this. She has lovingly challenged, advised, and counseled me quite a few times on my journey. We even launched a Q&A blog where we peppered each other with questions.
As a follow-up to my go-to strategies for family visits, I plucked a few key tips to consider and am listing my top ten:
- Don’t tell the person they are wrong.
- Don’t say “Remember when … “
- Don’t correct or challenge trivial things.
- Don’t assume they can’t understand you because they are silent.
- Don’t think they can’t communicate just because we can’t speak.
- Don’t talk about them to someone else in front of them.
- Don’t remind them of…
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Painting by Brian Froud
I’ve been looking into old faery lore lately. Not the sanitised Victorian version of miniature winged beauties, but at the old tales of strange encounters, customs that go back beyond memory, time lost in the faery realm and the darker aspects of the hidden folk. At the instigation of my writing partner, I watched a documentary and, amongst a few other ideas, one in particular got me thinking. The suggestion was that if faeries do not have a concrete and objective reality of their own in our world, but do exist for us in the realms of imagination, perhaps imagination itself is a state of being we do not fully understand, bridging the gap between our usual vision of reality and unreality in a way that has a validity of its own. As a concept, and after years of working with magical systems, that…
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Sun in Gemini 
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