Joanne's long walks: Italy to Santiago II Part 1: Via Domitia Day 37 Fontvieille

The trick of successful walking is knowing when to stop.

— Bill Bryson, A walk in the woods

My luck has run out. In 36 days of walking up to this point, I've had only one day of rain, plus one day that I took off because of the rain. But now, the months of summer sunshine are finally over - even in the south of France. Which is not too bad, considering that my aim for this section of my Long Walk was to reach Arles - and as of this morning, I had only ten more kilometres to go!

Jean-Jacques, my host in Fontvieille, refused to believe the weather forecast. Rain would interfere with the olive harvest! He popped out after dark to look at the sky and reported that he could see the stars: it definitely wasn't going to rain in the morning, no matter what Météo France had to say about it.

So as soon as I woke up in the morning, I opened my window and looked outside to see who was right: Jean-Jacques, or Météo France. Unfortunately, it was Météo France that had got the forecast right. Yet Jean-Jacques was undaunted in his optimism over breakfast; it was definitely going to stop raining soon!

Just in case it didn't, I donned all my waterproof layers, threw the high-visibility vest over the top of it all, and asked Rita to take my picture in this elegant garb before setting off in the rain. It was not raining very hard, so I took a detour through the centre of the village before leaving Fontvieille.

Covered marketplace

The main problem with walking in the rain is getting your phone wet. When you're using your mobile phone as a camera and an essential aid to navigation as well as for ordinary communication, it becomes a problem if it is unresponsive to cold, wet fingers or goes crazy whenever a drop of rain falls on the screen. My next phone will definitely be a rugged smartphone, to eliminate such problems. But in the meantime, I decided it was too complicated to navigate my way to Daudet's windmill - which I remember seeing last time I passed through Fontvieille, in 2017 on the Via Aurelia / GR 653A route. Only at that time, when I sat eating my picnic lunch right beside the windmill, I didn't realise it was the windmill that Daudet lived in, and I hadn't read his book Lettres de mon moulin, so it was just a pretty windmill to me!

On that occasion, and again today, I failed to find the exact spot where the Via Aurelia/GR 653A and the Via Domitia/GR 653D trails converge. Or perhaps there is no special sign to mark this point. In any case, I had to be careful not to follow the wrong GR trail markers and end up walking out of town... and find myself heading back home, on foot, along the coastal trail that I walked nine years ago!

Having decided it was too wet to go out of my way to look for the mill, I set off out of town along the promisingly named Route d'Arles, which was a fine road to walk on as it had both a cycling lane and a broad, grassy shoulder to walk on beyond that. I didn't have to worry about wet grass, in my waterproof socks and over-trousers. I was briefly distracted by a road sign indicating the presence of a Roman aqueduct, which I turned off the road to see, before realising that: 1. I had already passed the point where I would have seen the aqueduct had I stayed on the GR trail, and 2. I had seen the Roman aqueduct the last time I walked this stage, which is shared by both the GR 653D and the GR 653A. It wasn't particularly impressive, as Roman aqueducts go, and I wasn't going out of my way, in the rain, to see it again! If you would like to see a picture of it anyway, check out my description of my last day walking into Arles in 2017, available here. I did, however, see a very impressive earthworm, which almost made this otherwise futile detour worthwhile!

Back on the main road, I arrived at the Abbaye de Montmajour - half an hour before it was due to open. Having been unable to visit last time I came through, on account of it being a Monday, the weekly closure, I was determined to see the abbey this time. I went down into the parking lot, where there was a café, but it appeared to be just as firmly closed as the abbey itself, so there was nothing for it but to stand and wait for half an hour in the rain, under a somewhat permeable tree.

It was worth the wait! Definitely stop in, and pay the admission fee, if you are walking either of the two routes into Arles.

Montmajour has always been a place of pilgrimage. Proud owners of a piece of the True Cross, the monks established the site as a place of pilgrimage in the eleventh century, thereby increasing the abbey's influence and prosperity. On May 3rd of every year, the archbishop of Arles absolved of their sins everyone who journeyed to Montmajour to pray - and left a donation to finance the building of the abbey church of Notre-Dame. By the twelfth century, the pilgrims had become so numerous there wasn't room for them all in the crypt, and so the monks built the Chapel of the Holy Cross to accommodate them. Pilgrimage featured significantly in the local economy, as businesses in Arles provided accommodation, food and transportation services for thousands of pilgrims, seeing as Arles was also a stopping point on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela - just as it is today.

Graves dug directly into the rock

The hermitage of Saint Peter is the oldest surviving part of the monastery complex, dating back to the middle of the eleventh century and partly dug into the rock, partly constructed out of it.

The vast halls of the abbey church are now bare, because following the French revolution and the closing of the monasteries all over France, with seizure of their property by the state, Montmajour was auctioned off in 1791, and purchased by one Élisabeth Roux-Chatelard, who quickly demolished the monastery of Saint-Maur - a part of the complex built in the eighteenth century - and sold off all its fixtures, artworks and furnishings in order to finish paying for the property. "All sorts of doors, windows, panelling, floors and frames had disappeared [..] she had even sold the tiles and rubble!" remarked the outraged Pierre Véran, archaeologist and first curator of the Arles Museum of Antiquity, in 1795. But to no avail: Elisabeth was unable to complete the payments, and the abbey was put up for auction again in 1793. Etienne Roche bought the property and divided it into over 200 plots, sold to 28 different owners in 1795. The building was then used as a convenient source of ready-cut stone for the construction of various buildings in the area. The surviving constructions were used as craftsmen's workshops, haylofts and sheepfolds, causing further deterioration, until a series of restoration projects began in the late nineteenth century; the state took over the complex in 1945 and made it the national monument that it is today.

The cloister is one of the best-preserved and most interesting parts of the complex, not only for its Romanesque carved capitals but for the historic graffiti on its walls. The symbols scratched into the stone walls include a series of sailboats, dating back to the eleventh and twelfth centuries; it's unclear whether they are ex-votos giving thanks for a safe passage, symbols of a pilgrimage undertaken by sea, or what. Alongside these are specimens of less old, but still historic graffiti dating from the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The rest of the walk into Arles was not very exciting: mostly following the main road, sometimes on a path through the undergrowth beside it and sometimes, uncharacteristically for a GR trail, on the road itself. Coming into the outskirts of the city, I crossed a major roundabout and then followed the canal for a while - I could have walked beside it all day, but then I would have missed the Abbey of Montmajour. I then followed Avenue de Stalingrad into the city centre, taking a quick detour to the banks of the Rhône, where I had a view of the starting point for the continuation of this walk in the Spring!

But in the meantime, a hot shower and a bowl of soup were in order! Having secured permission for an early check-in at my miniscule "studio" flat in the city centre, I was able to warm up and dry out right away, making a meal out of instant tomato soup, with stale bread grilled in a frying pan and cut into croutons, sprinkled with thyme picked along the trail and the last of my Comte cheese.