Wednesday, 22 November Fontevraud. We're back on deck now, so here goes: On Sunday we decided to play tourist and visit Fontevraud Abbey. We left Preuilly sur Claise under leaden skies, expecting the day to stay rainy and overcast. We stopped at a rest area just outside Preuilly to take a photo of the colours of the forest around Boussay, before heading towards Chatellerault.
Once past Chatellerault we were on the route D, a Roman road of amazing straightness with only one bend between Chatellerault and Richelieu, a distance of 30km. Richelieu itself is well worth a visit, being a planned "new town" designed at the behest of Cardinal R himself.
The covered market place is amazing, but at the moment the open market is undergoing a rather severe rebuild, and more resembles the battlefields of the Somme than a quaint market. We arrived in Fontevraud just in time for lunch. This was taken at a fairly uninspring Creperie, and was more just refuelling than a gastronomic event. We decided on gallettes a savory, buckwheat crepe because it was a way of avoiding having two 3 course meals a day, which seems to have become our standard.
The Abbey itself is really very interesting, even though Susan and I were slightly dismissive at first of it's "newly minted" look. After the revolution it became a prison, and remained as such until By all accounts it was treated extremely poorly, with even the abbey church itself becoming a 2 level dormitory.
The restoration of the abbey complex has been the largest resoration program in France, and once you get past the shiny new parts and find the buidings yet to be worked on, you can see just how much they have had to do. Parts of the abbey are still roofed in corrugated iron and held up with railways sleepers. There are walls patched with bits of old door and metal sheets, and it is obvious that the pidgeons haven't been helping.
