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| Moored at Vouécourt |
I’ve
remarked before that the most common flower in the Marne valley at this time of
year seems to be the cowslip and it only occurred to us during our main walk on
Thursday that we see very few primroses.
The reverse is true in England, at least in our experience. Also, it
seems the cowslips have been in full bloom for longer this spring and very few flowers
have gone over to produce seed heads as yet.
I wonder if it has something to do with the warm weather at the
beginning of the flowering season followed by the current much cooler weather?
Our
walk on Thursday took us north from the village, up into the hills, along the
tops and then back down into the opposite end of the village. We’ve not been in such a hilly area for a
long time so we’re not so used to walking up and down steep inclines but at
least it must be doing us good if only to get our heart rates up. The microclimate in the woodland glades was particularly noticeable on this walk as butterflies were out whereas there
would have been very little chance of there any being on the wing in the valley
below where it was quite cold even in the full sun. It did mean we saw our first speckled wood of
the year though. These butterflies are lovers of
woodland glades and we've been most surprised we hadn’t seen one earlier in
the spring.
Walking back through the village we passed a small square, between the canal and the river, called Place des Auges.
Having
come across the French word for water troughs before we weren’t surprised to
see the remains of a long trough. The
length of the trough forms the side of the square so you can understand why I
said the square was small.
The
house next to our mooring is occupied by a very friendly man that we’ve taken
to calling yellow van man on account of his yellow van that looks like a la
poste van. He even beeps and waves madly
if passing us on a lane on his way to or from work. I imagine he’s off to work because he leaves
and returns the same time every day. The
paintwork on his bungalow is in the same yellow as his van as is the fence
around his plot. We assume he was also
responsible for the fishermen and yellow fence posts on the fishing platform just
in front of our boat that you can see in the picture at the top.
On
Friday morning Buddy and I took the car to Viéville, our next stopping point, parked
the car by the mooring and walked back along the towpath. Even though there were some motor cruisers
and yachts already moored there I could see there was a couple of spaces where
we could squeeze in.
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| Ample space for us at the mooring |
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| Getting ready to leave |
Yellow van man and his wife came out of their house to wave us off and they were still waving when we turned the corner to approach the lock in the village. We had one further lock to go up after that one before we reached the mooring at Viéville. Judging by the large piles of weed at both locks they had been freshly cleared of vegetation that had accumulated thus presenting us with no problems as we went through. We passed a field of Charolais cattle making us realise that we were getting ever closer to Burgundy. We hadn’t seen fields of Charolais since we were cruising in and around Burgundy in 2019.
There’s a lift bridge just before the mooring that has to be operated by VNF rather than by us using our télécommande which is the usual mode of operating bridges on this canal. I was just thinking about giving VNF a call to remind them we needed the bridge lifting when an éclusier, timing it perfectly, came by in his van.
We were soon through he bridge and mooring up having cruised three miles up two locks on Saturday.
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| Snuggly mooring |
Later in the afternoon I saw that I’d received an email from the Marne préfecture at Châlons-en-Champagne and that really got my hopes up. I immediately assumed that they’d sorted out the issue with my missing paperwork and were calling me in to get my residency card (you may remember that Karen received hers on Wednesday but not me as my paperwork had gone astray). When I opened the email and read it properly, I realised things had got worse: they reckoned I’d applied through a préfecture in the Dordogne and had already received my carte de séjour therefore I couldn’t apply again. It was too late to try and sort things out on Friday evening so that job will have to wait until Monday.
The five unoccupied boats moored at the quay looked like they hadn't moved for well over a year because of the lockdowns. They were likely to have overwintered there in 2019/20 and not been used at all last year like many sorry looking boats we see at ports. Viéville is one of those places where boaters have to pay but then that fee includes water and electricity, so we hooked up and settled in for the afternoon. In all our years boating in the UK we never hooked up to electric points, mind you unless you go into a marina there are only a few places that have canal side electric hook ups over there. This habit carried over when we came to France and we didn’t hook up at all during 2019. It took a long time to come to terms with paying for electricity especially when we have an engine and solar panels and we only hooked up three times last year. Anyway, we’ve decided that while we’re in lock down and not moving much that we’ll take advantage of the added benefits of having electricity on tap so to speak.
Saturday was food shopping day so, after completing our attestations explaining why we had to travel further then 10 kilometres, it was off to our nearest town, Chaumont. In the afternoon we had a look around Viéville and Vraincourt, the two closest villages to the east and west of the canal respectively. Both small places although Viéville boasted a post office and a small grocer’s store that looks like it made its money from making take away bruschetta and pizza providing they are reserved by pre-ordering. The service was only available on Wednesday and Saturday for some reason and then only late afternoons but that’s understandable because of the curfew.
We
came across more signs that were approaching Burgundy; glazed brickwork in
traditional colours. The traditional
Burgundian geometric patterns on roofs are stunning but many houses also sport coloured
glazed bricks.
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| Not quite Bourgogne and shame about the replacement glazing |
Vraincourt with fewer than 100 inhabitants was even smaller than Viéville but it still had a mairie although it was housed in a couple of rooms at the back of an old school:
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| Vraincourt church of Saint-Pierre-ès-Liens |
We planned a longer walk for Sunday taking in some viewpoints over the Marne valley. There’s one particular walk called the circuit of Marie Calvès that we keep seeing signage for. It makes us chuckle as it’s 74 kilometres long which is too far for us to walk in a day. I suppose in normal years it’s popular with hikers who probably stop over a couple of nights or so at different places en route.
We
elected to do the 12-kilometre circuit de Roche-Bernard which was yet another
hill walk, this one starting and finishing at the lift bridge in the
village. We didn’t see a soul until we
were about a kilometre from the end.
This was at the top of the Roche-Bernard itself; a sheer rock face
popular with climbers and it boasts 37 routes of varying climbing grades. A young couple had walked up from the village
for some quiet time at the top and annoyingly for them a mad English couple and
their dog were sitting up there already. As we were at the top of the cliff we had a view of the surrounding countryside so will have to have a walk along the valley another day in order to see the rock face itself.
The first few kilometres were through communal woodland which had the tell tale granite blocks marking the corners of each plot.
There was the odd sign of a tree or two having been felled in some plots but hardly any sign of replanting for sustainability. Mind you we can’t really comment as we’ve no idea how many trees each house burns a year. Most of the trees were beech and the logs in the woodpiles seemed to be mainly beech too. Beech has a long, hot burn so is very efficient, I imagine a couple of metre lengths would keep going all day in our stove.
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| Woodpiles at the edge of the communal woodland |
We spent the rest of Sunday relaxing in and around the boat, especially Buddy who had picked up a bit of a limp from his walk. I did do a bit of admin, getting the necessary paperwork together and making an appointment for Wednesday back at the préfecture in Châlons-en-Champagne, where I will be challenging the rejection of my residency application.
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