Here I am at one of my regular overnight specs at Clamecy and I woke up this morning to find ourselves (well, myself, for I was alone here apart from Strawberry Moose) swathed in a hanging cloud. It’s just typical of my adventures.
All I need now is a snowstorm and I will be fine.
In the night, though, I was in prison. I’m not sure why but anyway there I was. And it was something of an Open prison too for we were allowed out without surveillance to go to operas and dinners and so on. Bizarre. And then we learnt that Prince Harry had died – quite gruesomely it appeared, blown up in some kind of terrorist attack.
First stop on our travels this morning was the town of Clamecy. That’s always been one of my favourites – a real medieval planned town that was a nightmare to drive around before they put in the by-pass 12 or so years ago.
I had a good hour there for a good explore around and I have to say that it lived up to my expectations in every respect. I wasn’t disappointed at all.
The only downside of my visit was that I’d picked one of the two days when they were digging up some of the streets to replace the electric cables. Almost every photograph has a couple of workmen and a pile of building materials in it.
Such is life.
Varzy is the next town along the road. There’s a by-pass of sorts here, with several sharp turns in it that are quite challenging to a modern lorry, that is shown on a map of the area that I have that was dated from the 1930s.
It was therefore no surprise for me to find another one of these quiet, abandoned Medieval towns off the beaten track.
There’s much more to Varzy too than you would think at first glance and I spent a good hour or so here prowling around.
There wasn’t however anything particular to discover although I did make a little comment to myself that I don’t think that I have seen so many cats in one place than I have here. There was even one on the roof of an abandoned building.
After lunch I carried on along the road and discovered a ruined chateau, a neolithic hill fort with the remains of a medieval castle therein and a few other things like that, and this brought me to the town of Prémery.
That’s another town that has been by-passed a good while ago although the main road through it is certainly not as tight as many other places that have to date been overlooked.
Prémery has always been a town that has aroused my curiosity although, now having visited it, I can’t see why because there is nothing special of any note. It has a medieval chateau but then so do many other towns.
The chateau at Guérigny is a little different however. That was built at the time of the Renaissance by the looks of things and by the time that the Revolution put an end to things like this, it still hadn’t been finished. It became the offices for the iron and steel foundry in the town – a foundry that was contracted to the French Navy to supply all of the ironwork, including anchors and the like, for the ships.
The foundry closed down in 1971 and now the chateau is abandoned and overgrown.
Here, the rain that had been threatening for much of the afternoon finally burst into action and for about 45 minutes moving around was impossible. I managed however to fit in a couple of other things and was finally back home by 20:00 this evening – a day or so ahead of schedule.
And, as Golden Earring once famously said, “it’s good to be Back Home”
