Road to Home 2023 Day 6: Wisques - Thérouanne

“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”

― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

At the Abbaye de Nôtre-Dame in Wisques we took our dinner last night, and our breakfast this morning, in the company not of nuns but of three young girls who had retired to the convent to study for examinations. Two of them were preparing for university entrance examinations in engineering, while one was still in high school, studying for final exams. In the convent they have no distractions from the discipline of studying, and no need to worry about shopping and preparing meals - the nuns take care of all that! The abbey would also be a good place for a slimming cure: our dinner consisted of a thin vegetable soup followed by a soft-boiled egg and a dish of carrots and potatoes, bread, a slice of cheese, and a pudding. While the breakfast was a do-it-yourself affair, consisting of bread or toast with homemade jam and coffee. 

The guesthouse at Abbaye de Nôtre-Dame 

Abbaye de Nôtre-Dame 

From the village of Wisques - population 200, plus 16 nuns in the convent and I'm not sure how many monks in the monastery just up the road - we headed downhill into Esquerdes and then uphill again, through a forest and out onto a high plateau dotted with wind turbines.

Église de Saint-Martin, Esquerdes

We stopped to eat a bite and take a rest in a village with a pretty little public green by a pond. The benches were wet but I spread out my big new rain poncho on the ground as a sit-upon. And in any case I was wearing my waterproof trousers! It didn't rain at all, but they were handy for walking though a narrow stretch of path amid long grass and then through a very muddy bit!

The mud challenge was followed by a rocky sunken path - we speculated as to why it might be sunken and decided it must have been some sort of disused narrow-gauge railway line - coming out at another picnic area in Delettes. The rocky ground had been hard on the feet so I spread out my poncho again on the wet picnic table bench and we sat and rested for a while.

A final straight stretch along asphalt brought us past a number of farms into the town of Thérouanne: a real town, with facilities, including a couple of supermarkets and bakeries as well as a very well cared-for pilgrim hostel, operated by Alain and Patricia, who had given us the door code to get in. I called to tell them we had arrived and Alain said to make ourselves at home and help ourselves to tea and coffee. There was even wine and beer waiting in the fridge, available at cost price, to be paid for in the piggy bank on the kitchen counter. We happily "fed the pig" whenever we grabbed a beer from the fridge and for the bottle of wine we opened at dinner. A trip to the larger of the town's two supermarkets was almost overwhelming after the "gastronomic desert" of the past few days (and, I expect, the next couple of days as well, maybe even longer considering the Sunday and Monday morning closures...). 

I made pasta with broccoli, while Henry did a few sausages and Laurie put together a salad. Dessert was an enormous flan from the bakery, the remains of which will be breakfast, too! We were joined at our all-Canadian dinner table by Marie-Laure, a French walker (finally!) who lives in Paris but is originally from a farming village near Peronne, the destination of her walk for now - she is taking a week off from her job as a secretary and a mother of four in the big city, getting away from it all and walking along the Via Francigena to her childhood home!

Today's accommodations: Gîte Eden

The lost city of Thérouanne 

Our host Alain explained to us that Thérouanne was an important city in medieval times, a bishopric with a population of 15,000 and the largest cathedral in France. In 1553 the Holy Roman Emperor King Charles V, in revenge for a defeat at the hands of the French during the seige of Metz, ordered that the town be razed to the ground, all the buildings destroyed, the roads ploughed under and the fields salted. Only a small outlying part of the town was left, which became the modern Thérouanne. The former site of the town is now an archaeological site, and a museum in town displays artefacts found there, but we were unable to visit it as it was about to close by the time we arrived. 

Wisques - Thérouanne 23 km