Tapp's Travels

Camping Alouette in Cognac-le-Forêt is our next target.  But getting there involves a fairish journey on N and D roads.  The French have REALLY taken to speed bumps.  It must be a love affair.  Otherwise they would be up in arms.  This should have been the trigger for hundreds of Frenchies to don yellow jerseys and drive through towns and villages at 5 kph sounding their horns continuously.  They love a good strike or civil unrest.  But they appear to love their speed bumps even more.

They usually define, or are contained within, the 30 kph zones.  The speed limit itself is OK if a tad slow in many cases.  It’s the bloody 45 degree slope you have to ascend for three metres before leveling off for 10 m and then the sudden angular descent onto the bottom of the car’s springs.  Tyre manufactures and breakdown companies probably sponsor the perishing things.

Anyway, driving a car over them is distracting enough, especially if one is careless enough to get one’s tongue between one’s teeth at the critical moment.  But to do it towing a caravan is another ball game altogether!  If tackled at more than 5 kph the shock waves travelling backwards and forwards through the car’s chassis (do we still have those?) are enough to drive a sane person, insane.  In my case, of course, that doesn’t take much!  The first one of a trip is sort of OK, but after that I find myself yelling at any French person in earshot to put on.their “Gilets Jaunes” and get demonstrating.  The really severe ones actually cause the rear of the caravan to ground.  And it’s a road-legal trailer with correct clearances.  Today we actually drove over one of these damned things while already on an extended elevated section.  A bump on a bump!

While I’m on the subject of traffic “calming” measures, there are two sorts of obstruction designed specifically to cause collisions.  Firstly there are the physical barriers.  These, in their various forms, reduce the road width to a single lane.  They range in severity from pretend ones, where the road surface of one side of the road is painted bright yellow or red, to massive great planters with bushes or trees in them.  They never come alone.  At the very least there’s one at each end of a village.  In severe cases of road un-safety madness, you can find yourself running a slalom course through town.  And the direction that has priority, changes, seemingly at random!

The other sort of insane road furniture involves an extended hexagon with severe kerbs on both sides.  These are to be found in the middle of the road at random intervals.   Around them, the carriageways are deflected to mirror the hexagonal shape.  They are like a double chicane each way.  To negotiate them, it is necessary to steer in towards the pavement and any passing pedestrian.  That’s alarming enough, although hitting a Frenchman or two probably wouldn’t write the caravan off.  But at the exit you have to steer towards the other lane and, of course any oncoming vehicles.  Much more dangerous!  Naturally, these are supposed to be negotiated at reduced speeds.  But that’s not French driving style.  They like to drive as straight as they can through the obstruction often using the angled kerb to help bounce them 45 degrees outwards and then 45 degrees back again.

While towing a caravan it’s necessary to “over-run” corners to avoid hitting the kerb with the caravan wheels. Getting past these ridiculous features while towing therefore involves driving further to the right and subsequently further to the left than when driving solo.  From the passenger’s perspective it must be a nightmare when coming out of the constriction.  Driving what looks like straight into the wrong lane.

They used to say that most pedestrian fatalities in France occur on zebra crossings.  I bet if a survey of urban car accidents was done properly, these calming measures would feature high on the list as causative agents!  Talk about distracting drivers from what’s going on around!  Things like pedestrians, stray dogs, children, road signs and discussions about what we are having for tea all take a low priority at these times of stress!

Sorry about the rant.  I’m going for a lie down now!  I’ve picked up some products to assist “driver-calming” measures!

Arriving at our new “home” after a drive in wet weather, we found large sections of the site were fenced off.  Too wet to drive onto.  A number of people were isolated in the no-go areas.  The campsite owners were flying in supplies and drinking water by drone.  Our choice was in a “marginal area”.  If we hadn’t got 4 wheel drive, we wouldn’t have got in.  Two (dry) days later, the track in was still “interesting”!

And the caravan wheels showed signs of a semi-submerged approach!

But our pitch is very spacious and open with a good outlook over surrounding fields and woods.

The nearby village of Rochechouart is world famous.  Well, famous in certain circles.  Well, at least Glenda knew about it – her extensive research had told her how this place (somewhat before I was born) experienced a life-changing event.  Catastrophic, even!

But before we get to that, it’s time for a snackette.  An excellent quiche and salad at a road-side delicatessen on the main route through town.  While we sat there, the sum total of vehicles passing was exactly … none.  OK,  we weren’t there all afternoon, but a zero score indicates that this town is an LTN or, as the Lord Mayor of London would say, a low traffic neighbourhood!

And now the catastrophe.   For a change, we weren’t involved in this one in any way.  But as disasters go, it was pretty epic.  There was a major meteorite strike just near where we are sitting.

These remnants may or may not be original star dust.  As they are just sitting on the pavement, I suspect a bit of artistic replication may have been involved.  But you never know.  If we extrapolate our traffic survey, we can deduce that no cars have past them in living memory.  So no cosmological expert or “meteorite-ologist would have driven by and recognised them for what they are.  Anyway, real or copy, these fellows would have made the ground shake a bit when they landed.  However, they are only fragments of the main event!

It was actually a whole asteroid that struck.  Calculated to have been about 1.5 km in diameter and weighing some 6,000 million tons.  It hit Rochechouart at a speed of 20 km a second with an energy some 14 million times that of the Hiroshima bomb.  It left a crater more than 25 km in diameter.  (Someone’s calculator must have more buttons on it than mine to work that lot out!)

Although this all happened a wee while ago  – some 200 million years previously – the full extent of what had happened here was only recognised in the 1970s and 1980s.  And it was as recently as 2008, that the French State acknowledged the heritage value of the Rochechouart Impact Structure, creating the “Réserve Naturelle Nationale de l’Astroblème de Rochechouart-Chassenon”.  Educational point – the term Astrobleme, (or Astroblème in French) is synonymous with “Impact Structure”.  Literally it means  “Star Wound”.  The meteorite event is celebrated in town every year – and this year it’s next week!  They already have the bunting up outside the château.

We are gutted.  We were really looking forward to seeing all the locals (who don’t drive past the delicatessen) dress up as meteorites.  The mind boggles!

The château is home to a collection of modern art.  They don’t have tickets for seniors, so they gave us student rates!  (The reduction possibly more to do with a closed gallery than our pensionable status.)

The modern art collection was – well,  modern art.  Not my cup of tea really!  But the château itself was lovely …

… they even unlocked the door to the terrace for us.  Probably when they realised we weren’t into long rows of rubble masquerading as art!  Here is Glenda admiring what was essentially the floor of a massive crater – the rim of the impact structure having long since weathered away.

The wall paintings were excellent.  Above the rubble, you can see some of the ten tasks of Hercules.  The mural below, depicted a hunting scene:

These two styles of fresco offer a rare combination of the colourful wall painting (characteristic of the style of the end of the Middle Ages) and the “grisaille” technique (shades of grey only).  Apparently an innovation of 16th century art.

The château has been completely and beautifully renovated inside.  The roof space gives a clear indication of the structural complexity of the building..

We never did find the closed-off gallery!

So that was how we spent a happy Sunday.  Quiche and salad for lunch with no passing traffic.  Followed by an OAP tour of an ancient building located within the crater of an even more ancient astrobleme!  Old, ancient and prehistoric!

More tragedy in the next episode!