Europe > France > Auvergne > Conques > Articles > Romanesque Auvergne with my Father

“Ah yes, how very well I remember this,” remarked my father, leaning on his walking stick and gazing around the cloister of Moissac Abbey. “It’s a moment to savour, isn’t it?” He moved closer to the nearest capital to inspect its carving, a vigorous Romanesque scene of a monkey in the act of winding up a crossbow. “I was quite sure,’ Dad said slowly, more to himself than to me, “quite sure I’d never see these lovely things again.”

However many countries one may flirt with over the course of the years, there’s generally a special place that stays in the affections through thick and thin, like a lifetime’s grande affaire. When I asked Dad where he’d most like to revisit, the one place above all others he’d dearly love to see once more, he didn’t hesitate. ‘Oh, France,’ he responded immediately. ‘Those gorgeous Romanesque churches all round the Auvergne. I don’t suppose I ever shall, though. No, I’ve said my final goodbyes to them, I should think.’

It was good to be able to sprinkle a little fairy dust Dad’s way. At 86 he’s pretty fit and in possession of a formidable bank of knowledge – not to mention a restless curiosity about French history, and a great love of French countryside, churches and people. An anno-domini-related problem with his balance and with picking up his feet put paid a little while ago to the long-distance walks we enjoyed together well into his eighties. But I knew how much he’d relish navigating me through the Auvergne on a car-borne hunt for the gems of Romanesque church architecture that have lodged themselves in his heart over all these years.

As we left Moissac Abbey a wedding party was taking up position in the elaborately carved south porch with much tooting of horns. We enjoyed watching the groom making everyone smile for the photographer by getting them to mouth ‘Pipi’ – the French equivalent of ‘cheese!’ We drove in leisurely style north-east into the fringes of the Auvergne, passing through a succession of villages bathed in evening sunlight where tractors laden with hay bales were the fastest moving things. “La France profonde,” was Dad’s comment, a perfect summing-up.

The Moulin de Cambelong stood deep in a thickly wooded gorge beside a loudly rushing weir on the Dourdou river. The Moulin is no longer a mill; these days it’s one of the most beautifully situated hotels in the Auvergne. We swung our bedroom windows open and went to sleep to the hypnotic hiss of the weir. Next morning we ate Sunday breakfast under the stare of Topaze, the hotel’s lugubrious basset hound, and his three-legged feline sidekick.

From the Moulin de Cambelong a twisty road rises to the perfectly preserved medieval village of Conques, huddled on the edge of a gorge round the towering Romanesque cathedral church of Sainte-Foy. This is one of Dad’s favourites, but he had never yet been to a service in the church. Sunday Mass was an emotional affair of beautiful singing and warm preaching. We shared our pew with a group of friends walking the long and footsore road to Santiago de Compostela, their pilgrim status marked by the scallop shells that swung dangling from their backpacks.

In the Cathedral treasury we found ‘La Majesté’, a much-adored golden reliquary in the shape of a statue of Sainte-Foy. Other superbly enamelled and jewelled reliquaries were on display, too, including the hugely elaborate casket of the 12th-century Abbot Boniface. Pilgrims educated and illiterate, sophisticated lords and credulous peasants all flocked to Conques in medieval times to view and venerate these containers, said to hold the body parts of holy men and women. But it was the great carved tympanum over the west door of Conques Cathedral, packed with graphic scenes of heaven and hell, that opened a window on the medieval mind for Dad and me.

The Romanesque style, so plain in its architecture and so wonderfully expressive in its decorative carvings, flourished in the Auvergne in the 11th and 12th centuries in astonishing depth and vigour. It was the simplicity of its basic Christian message, allied to the exquisite artistry, the humour and humanity of the master masons who created these churches, that so captivated my father. It immediately drew me under its spell, too.

“O sinners,” read the inscription on the tympanum at Conques, “if you do not mend your ways, know that you will suffer a dreadful fate.” What that fate was, as far as fornicators, thieves, misers and the spiritually lazy were concerned, was all too clearly depicted: roasting, torture, being fed to a ravening beast, having Satan himself tear you with his talons. Brightly painted as it was, the tableau must have terrified those who crowded round to stare.

After Conques, the other Auvergnat churches could have been an anticlimax. But Dad had selected his itinerary well. The ones he chose were so beautifully sited in their green hollows among the hills, and each so richly expressive of that genius for marrying simplicity and detail, that it was like picking this dish and that from a celestial menu.

We drove to Orcival down gorges and up through chestnut woods where red kites were wheeling, and found a stocky church of black volcanic stone where a 12th-century statue of the Virgin with a strong, square face sat impressively in the gloom, staring solemnly down the aisle. At St-Nectaire the carvings on the cathedral capitals were so extraordinary – St Peter sneaking away from the scene of Jesus’s arrest, St Nectaire battling across the River Tiber in a little boat, angels and beasts in combat – that one hardly felt they could be outshone anywhere. And there was another sublime 12th-century statue of the Virgin here, too, in bizarre contrast to the neighbouring gilt bronze bust of St Baudine, a pagan-looking idol with coldly staring eyes of ivory and horn.

The Auvergne is not simply about Romanesque churches. In many ways this is rural France’s most appealing region, an area of winding back roads, of lost-and-gone hamlets, of tree-smothered hills and of wheat fields bright with poppies and corncockles. Wandering the side lanes in second gear, stopping to sniff wild thyme on a hillside or have a glass of wine and a bite of cheese in some sleepy village square at three in the afternoon, letting the conversation ramble from the wartime Mediterranean to the efficiency of hearing aids by way of baroque music and scurrilous sailors’ songs, Dad and I wound down into the kind of peaceful harmony that back-country France so beautifully induces.

A vital component of any holiday with a senior parent is the comfort and the sense of bon accueil at the hotel. If the Moulin de Cambelong surpassed our expectations, so did the others – in the north the elegant old hunting lodge of the Château de Maulmont near Riom, and in the south the pale stone Château des Salettes, perched on a rise of ground not far from Toulouse among its own vineyards and commanding a memorable view over nightingale-haunted countryside.

Even so, it was those Romanesque churches that knitted the whole expedition together. On one of our last days we found ourselves in a church we’d never heard of, the abbey of Mozac near Clermont-Ferrand. The carved capitals were the best we had seen. Three of them had been brought down to the floor of the nave so that visitors could appreciate their sculptures close to – a brilliant idea.

One of the scenes showed three almond-eyed women at the tomb of Jesus. Clearly moved, my father spent a long time gazing at these figures. ‘Of all the splendid things we’ve seen on this trip,’ he murmured, ‘I think it’s these marvellous timeless expressions I’m most drawn to.’ He pushed back his head and stood motionless, staring and musing, as the carved women gazed back at him across the centuries.

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