To Santiago/A sort of pilgrimage (VÉZELAY TOWARDS THE PYRENNES):A display of skill and arrogance is witnessed before coming across a medieval superpower's magnet for pilgrims, writes Peter Murtagh.
Yesterday we saw our first wheelie. It was a wheelie executed for our entertainment and was a display of skill and youthful arrogance worthy of a matador.
The rider was on a gold coloured Triumph, one of those aerodynamic machines where the rider's feet are resting somewhere around the rear wheel, he's lying almost flat along the petrol tank and the handlebars seem to be about half way down the front forks.
Basically, it's a bullet bike.
We were on a ring road round a town, he passing us, we passing him and stopping at traffic lights. He eyes our BMWs, we inspect his Triumph. We're cruising, he's racing. No problem. Respect brother, respect.
And then, after the final set of lights when the road is off straight again, he darts ahead about four or five cars.
And then, in what seemed like slow motion, the front wheel of his bike rose into the air, to an angle of about 45 degrees, and remained as he sped forward for maybe 100 or 200 metres. Between the cars, along the road in a 70 km speed limit area!
He lowered the front wheel once, maybe twice, each time raising it again. It was like a hand waving bye, bye. And with that he was gone in a scream of power, surging into the horizon.
The road from Vezelay in southern Burgundy, where our sort of pilgrimage to Santiago De Compostela finally got under way, goes south-west towards the Pyrenees through Perigord.
From Clamecy to Bourges it is a route of almost unrelenting boredom. Great sweeping flat upland fields that stretch almost as far as the eye can see, most of them planted with cereal crops, many of them harvested, rampaging combines mowing through the others as we pass.
The landscape is pock-marked by clutches of small forests and the occasional oak tree but not much else. It's a single carriageway road and so passing the five-axel trucks is testing.
But then the roads drop down into the Loire valley to a place named La Charité-sur-Loire and the most vast church you can imagine, set a few metres back from the banks of the river.
In its heyday, it must have been beautiful and it must also have exuded vast power simply by being there - an arrogance that would knock a wheelie biker into a cocked hat.
This place, known simply as La Charité was built by the Abbey of Cluny, the regional superpower in the ninth, 10th and 11th centuries, a religious enterprise that was crucial to the popularisation of Santiago as a place of pilgrimage.
The Cluniacs were imperialists. At the height of their power, they had 300 dependencies in France, Portugal, England and Constantinople. When they decided to expand their influence into Iberia, they did so by promoting Mary Magdalen - she of Vezelay - and St James - he of Santiago - because of their established appeal for pilgrims.
Sponsorship took the form of bankrolling construction, in the case of La Charité a place of worship so vast that it was said when completed in 1204 (building began in 1052) to be one of the largest churches in Europe, on a par with the great abbey at Cluny itself.
Hundreds of monks prayed and sang praise to God seven times a day and were preoccupied with the poor, a preoccupation they believed symbolised Christ among them.
With this sort of appeal, it wasn't long before La Charité became a draw for pilgrims en route to Santiago. The Cluniacs believed in the importance of the remission of sins and this sparked, as Dagmar Ó Riain-Raedel of UCC has written, "an unprecedented wave of pilgrimage throughout Europe".
And 500 years after building started, La Charité was partly destroyed by fire. Sometime later, a bright spark had the notion of using some of the rubble to build houses where bits of the church used to be. Another genius wanted to put a road through the nave . . .
The end result today is an engaging mess, a wreck of a religious settlement that remains huge but broken, surrounded by tourist cafes and narrow streets.
Part of the nave remains but little (if any) medieval stained glass. (There is one small rose window showing two men in a boat who look like Celts or Norse raiders perhaps: they have green flowing robes and one has what might be a Celtic pattern design on the lower edge of his cloak.)
From La Charité, the pilgrim route goes through Bourges and Châteauroux and Argenton-sur-Creuse.
We fast track down the motorway to grind down the kilometres and spend the night at Thiviers.
- Next: The Pyrenees, with luck . . .