Joanne's long walks: Road to Home 2023 Day 1: Calais

“Ce n’est que le premier pas qui coûte.”

"It's only the first step that counts"

- French proverb

Calais - Wissant 21 km

Not sure how true this proverb is... and Hilaire Belloc, who quotes it in The Path to Rome, his account of his 1902 journey to Rome on foot, strongly disagrees. But a lot of effort certainly goes into taking that first step - months of training, weeks of planning, a day or so of travel to the selected departure point.

I took my first step on the Via Francigena as soon as I stepped out the door of the hostel in Calais, located just behind the first row of prime waterfront buildings. As is often the case on the night before beginning a daunting undertaking, I had not slept a lot. It was Saturday night in Calais, as elsewhere, and the auberge de jeunesse, a rather institutional place, was hosting groups of teenagers on some weekend programme as well as several football teams consisting of very small boys. I'm not sure which it was that decided to take the opportunity for a pyjama party, but their rooms must have been directly under mine, and by the time they called it a night, it was nearing the hour in which I habitually wake up! This background noise combined with the agitation of beginning a new voyage and too much chocolate before bed (packed some leftover Easter eggs, ostensibly for snacks along the trail...) meant that I did not get as much as sleep as the level of comfort of the bed in my simple private room deserved!

Making crêpes for football teams at breakfast in Calais

As you can see in the screenshot below, the first stage of the Via Francigena in France does not proceed directly southward in the direction of Rome, but takes you on a side trip to Wissant, 20 km further west along the coast from Calais. Then you spend the next day walking southeast, ending up near Guînes, which would have been only half a day's walk from Calais had you gone directly!

Why the wiggle?

So why does the Via Francigena meander along the coast to Wissant instead of heading directly south to Guînes? Because Archbishop Sigeric the Serious, whose journey the modern Via Francigena reconstructs, did not take a car ferry to Calais but sailed to Wissant, which was the major port in his day, back in the year 990. The port has sanded up over the course of the last thousand years, and pilgrims coming from the start of the Via Francigena in Canterbury now take the ferry to Calais, but the Via Francigena travels from Calais along the seaside to Wissant in order to join Sigeric's historic route.

Besides, it's an amazingly beautiful walk!

Within 15 minutes of beginning the very first day of my walk, I met four other Canadians! One of them lives near where I grew up, on Vancouver Island, and another is originally British, from Manchester, where I have aunts and uncles and cousins! 😄

Proving the veracity of two other common proverbs:

1. The cammino provides; and

2. The world is a small place!

Together we walked along the beach to Sangatte, climbed the hill to Noir-Mottes and then to the monument atop Cap Blanc-Nez, where we stopped for lunch. Below us were white cliffs just like those across the Channel in Dover, and the gravel on the path was composed of flintstones, which, I learned in Kent last year, always come with chalk. As the morning mists cleared we could see the White Cliffs of Dover across the Channel, though not clearly enough to photograph them.

Following one of the most scenic lunch breaks on the Via Francigena, we descended to walk along the top of the cliffs in the photo below, then down to the beach for the rest of the way into Wissant.

Wissant

The name Wissant comes from the Dutch Witzand, "white sand" (duh!). This village of a thousand souls located at the eastern end of a lagoon has been a fishing village since medieval times, when it was also a major port of embarkation to Britain; it was from here that Thomas Becket set sail on the first day of December 1170, headed for Canterbury and martyrdom.

The shifting coastal sands silted up the harbour around the end of the 12th century, around the time that the harbour of Calais was rising in importance. Around the end of the 19th century people began to build villas on the sand dunes, and in the early 20th century an entrepreneur from Calais dug up sand and gravel from the dunes in order to fill in the bed of the former lagoon to the west of Wissant. The area excavated is now a nature reserve, with lakes that have formed in the hollows left behind by the excavations.

Upon arriving in this fine seaside town I repaired to my accommodations, washed myself and my clothes, and spent the rest of the afternoon basking in the sun along with my rapidly drying laundry. The afternoon sunshine floods directly in through the window of my small but comfortable room, only a hundred metres from where my new friends, Henry, Haidee, Marjorie and Laurie, are staying. I can in fact hear them chatting over a beer at their hotel bar as I write this! We parted with a promise to meet again for dinner at seven.

Laundry should be dry by then!