You’re off to Great Places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting, so… get on your way
- Dr. Seuss, Oh, the places you’ll go
Today is the day... to get on your way... on a train to Calais!!!
It took a day and a half to get from my hometown in Italy to Calais, in order to begin the French part of the Via Francigena. First, a train to Turin, where I stayed overnight with a Canadian friend I met on the Camino de Santiago four years ago. Catching up with Alyssen, who has since moved to Italy, over drinks in a garden surrounded by tulips was the perfect way to begin a new Long Walk adventure!
Up before dawn, I walked across the sleeping city to the station to catch the 7:11 high-speed train from Turin to Paris. Only six hours, and so much more relaxing than flying! My only complaint about the train is that it's painted with pretty pictures on the outside, so that you can't see out very well through the windows: it's like looking through mesh - very fatiguing on the eyes! It's too bad, because the landscape coming through the Alps would have been stunning. But apparently train designers think that passengers nowadays would rather look at their phones than at the landscape, so they provide a wi-fi connection, but not windows that you can actually see through.
I had two and a half hours to make my connection in Paris, and it only takes an hour to walk from the Gare du Lyon to the Gare du Nord. Who needs the métro? I even had time to wander arund an antiques market, and to peer through the windows of shopfronts at hordes of African hairdressers busy making braids.
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| Two hours in Paris? Who wants to spend them underground?? |
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| Street market |
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| Dunno what this is, but it looks impressive! |
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| The Gare du Nord |
Then another high-speed train whisked me off to Calais, the start of the Via Francigena in France and the continuation of the trail I followed last year from Leeds, Yorkshire - my birthplace - to Dover, just 34 km away across the Channel.
34 kilometres - that's only a day's walk - if you're Jesus, and can walk on water! If you're not, you have to take the ferry, which is what most Via Francigena walkers do.
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| Ferry departing Calais |
Calais is the town in France closest to England, and in fact Calais has been an important centre for transport and trade with England since the Middle Ages. For this reason it has always been disputed between the two powers: during the Hundred Years War, Edward III of England laid siege to Calais in 1346. Angered by the city's "obstinate defence", King Edward ordered that the entire population of the city be put to the sword.
The Burghers of Calais
Contemporary chronicler Jean Froissart tells the story of what happened next: Edward offered to spare the people of the city if six of its leaders would surrender themselves to him, presumably to be executed. Edward demanded that they walk out of the city gate bareheaded and barefoot, carrying the keys to the city and castle and wearing nooses around their necks, offering themselves to be hanged. One of the wealthiest of the town leaders, Eustache de Saint Pierre, volunteered first, and five other burghers joined him as Saint Pierre led this envoy of volunteers to the city gates.
Auguste Rodin captured this moment, and the Burghers' poignant mix of defeat, heroic self-sacrifice, and willingness to face imminent death, in his famous sculpture Les Bourgeois de Calais, scaled somewhat larger than life, erected in the city in 1895.
Rodin's design was controversial because it lacked "overtly heroic antique references" and the positive image of glory considered essential in public sculpture at the time; it contained no allegorical figures, it was not in the usual pyramidal arrangement, and it was designed to be placed not on a pedestal, but at ground level. Rodin wanted the townspeople to "almost bump into the figures" so that they would feel solidarity with them, experiencing their "pain, anguish and fatalism", which the sculptor saw as the true heroism of self-sacrifice.
According to Froissart's story, the burghers expected to be executed, but their lives were spared by the intervention of England's queen, Philippa of Hainault, who persuaded her husband to be merciful by claiming that their deaths would be a bad omen for the unborn child she was carrying.
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burghers_of_Calais)
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| Another cast of the Burghers of Calais, in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art |
Calais under British rule
A treaty in 1360 formally assigned Calais to English rule. Under the British, the city grew into a thriving centre of wool production, known as the "brightest jewel in the English crown" owing to its great importance as the gateway for the tin, lead, lace and wool trades.
Calais remained under English control for two hundred years, until it was recaptured by France in 1558. It was under English rule that the cathedral of Notre-Dame was built: the only church in France built in what is known as the English perpendicular style: a style of late-Medieval Gothic architecture typically featuring large windows with perpendicular vertical and horizontal tracery and pointed four-centred arches.
Unfortunately the cathedral was closed by the time I got there, and so I was unable to see the inside of one of the few surviving historic buildings in Calais, which was largely destroyed (again) in the Second World War.
World War II destruction
Calais was virtually razed to the ground during World War II: in May 1940, it was a strategic bombing target of the invading German forces who took it during the siege of Calais. The Germans built massive bunkers along the coast in preparation for launching missiles at England. In May 1940 the city was under siege again for several days, and much of it was flattened by artillery and dive-bombing before falling to the Germans, who made it their command post for the region and fortified the town heavily as they believed the Allies would invade there. Calais was very heavily bombed and shelled in a successful effort to disrupt German communications and persuade them that the Allies would target the area, but the Allied invasion on D-Day actually took place much further west, in Normandy.
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| The modern Place d'Armes, with a sculpture of General De Gaulle and his wife |
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| An admirable example of the type of post-war architecture beautifying the Calais waterfront |
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| Stylish fast-food kiosks on the waterfront |
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| The burgers of Calais come with plenty of fries! |
The Calais Jungle
The city of Calais saw an invasion of another kind around the turn of the millennium, when migrants and asylum seekers from various troubled parts of the world began to set up makeshift camps in which to bide their time while awaiting an opportunity to stow away on a vehicle travelling across the Channel to England.
Many of the migrants eluded attempts to resettle them elsewhere in France, refusing to give up their hopes of crossing the Channel, hiding out on the outskirts of Calais to wait for their big chance. The "Calais migrant crisis" continues to be a source of strife between Britain and France today.
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| If you look closely you will see a migrant's sleeping bag in this picture, taken outside the train station |
Car en aquest mont nos sen tuit pellegrin.
(Nor despise the stranger which cometh from far.
For in this world we are all pilgrims.)
- La Nobla Leyçzon – The Noble Lesson, 12th-century Waldesian text
Today's accommodations: Centre Européen de Séjour
This day of preparation for walking the Via Francigena in France ended in the best possible way, with a webinar by the author of my brand-new guidebook, the Reverend Sandy Brown, about - walking the Via Francigena in France!
Thank you Sandy for all the helpful advice! I am looking forward to starting to put it in practice tomorrow morning!!
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