August 6, 2019
Over the hills
Cercié to Charolles
AS a student of farming, you will know that you can navigate France by its cows. There are the wide-horned cows of Aubrac and the soft-eyed brown cows of the Limousin and the double-haunch blondes of Aquitaine.
And here around Charolles are milk-coloured Charollais, a breed so pretty that you wonder anyone dare let them out into the mud.
Charolles is in Bourgogne, which people outside France know as Burgundy. And that is a wine area, another example of how regional France is when it comes to eating and drinking. Certainly, if you mention a place to anyone in France, you'll hear what food the town or area is known for.
Today we have passed through Beaujeu, which makes a lot of being home to Beaujolais wine, and into Burgundy. And we are in Charolles, a verdant, peaceful region where white cows go about looking pretty with no suspicion they are valued for their beef.
Or the bulls are, anyway. It is one of life's curiosities that we all know that bulls are rare yet cows are everywhere, without wondering why. The answer is that bulls get eaten and cows don't. Cows are milked and cows produce more cows - by insemination - while bulls are wheeled down to the abattoir and dispatched.
Males don't always have the best deal in life.
It's from Charolles that we'll follow a route which has acquired more names than it needs. It was originally named after Charles le Téméraire, who came from Dijon but became Count of Charolais and the duke of Burgundy. Charolles makes a lot of him and tomorrow, on a day off, we'll wander up the town's small hill, gaze at a tower that he may have lived in or locked people up in, and then wander off for a coffee.
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Charles le Téméraire sounds a lot better than the English translation of Reckless Charles.
It's hard to know why anyone should celebrate him, even with a bike path, because he couldn't get into a fight he didn't lose and he couldn't seal a deal without reneging on it.
In a bit of history in which nobody is now interested, Charles decided to march to Nancy to take on Lorraine and neighbouring Switzerland. The best battles are fought in summer but Charles picked midwinter, so that by Nancy much of his army had died of the cold or preferred to go home.
You and I would have thought better of it. But Charles fought anyway, with just a few thousand men, with the result that his naked body was found in the river a few days later with its head cut off.
For some reason, our new bike route is to his glory. Not surprisingly, it has since acquired the less embarrassing title of VR50.
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We got here today by following the remaining kilometres of the rail trail and then turning off in Beaujeu to head for the hills. That meant three cols, not as glorious as those of the Tour de France but strenuous enough under a hot sun. One was more than 700m and one more than 500. I won't brag about the third because it was little more than a click through the gears and the leafy, twisting road that followed it was harder than the original climb.
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I always take pictures of col signs. I don't know why but, having started, there seems no reason to stop. I could, although I'm disinclined to, join the Club de Cent Cols. They ride as many hills as they can, with the dry concentration of stamp collectors, then brag about how many they've tackled.
There are several of these organisations and, in the Pyrenees once, I came across a British one holding a meeting at the top of a long climb. Anyone less single-minded would have chosen a village hall or even a bar. But, no, hills weren't just for climbing and then whooshing down the other side; they were there to sit and discuss motions and counter-propositions in the sort of cold wind you'd expect to blow across mountains high enough to separate France from Spain.
We are staying in a hotel tonight, our reward for the climbing and a sign of our sweaty clamminess. And also, more seriously, because forecasters say the dark sky over the town is the sign of a storm that will rain hail upon us. Since tents will stand many things but rarely hail, a hotel is a safe option.
On the way down the valley into town, we stopped at a cemetery for water. Nearly all French cemeteries have taps. The first grave we saw was that of the Thévenet family, a reminder that the area's cycling son came from here, and more precisely from the aptly named hamlet of Le Guidon.
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