When I read that Saint Pierre d’Aulnay-de-Saintonge Church outside La Rochelle was part of the Route de Santiago de Compostela, I immediately wanted to see it. Ever since I read about Santiago de Compostela in Spain (Galicia) and the routes going there in Gourmet magazine as a child, I have been interested by this pilgrimage route of the Middle Ages.
Santiago de
Compostela houses the tomb of Christ’s apostle Saint James the Great according
to the UNESCO World Heritage Center (whc.unesco.org/en/list/868) and became
famous after Godescalc, the Bishop of Le Puy in Auvergne, France became one of
the first foreign pilgrims to the site in 951.
For more
than a thousand years pilgrims from all levels of society have been walking the
Route de Santiago through France to get
to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
UNESCO’s World Heritage Center writes that the success of the pilgrimage
“coincided with that of the Clunaic Order.”
The Cluny Order, headquartered in Burgundy (France), encouraged the
worship of relics, which were often housed at stops along the Route of Santiago
de Compostela.
There are
four main pilgrimage routes in France starting from Paris, Vézaley, Le Puy, and
Arles. Subsidiary routes fed into the
three main routes as follows according to the UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Paris –
Routes from Boulogne, Tournai, and the Low Countries converged here.
Le Puy
(Auvergne) – Routes from the Rhône Valley converged here.
Arles (Provence)
– Routes from Italy converged here.
For Vézelay
(Burgundy), I consulted the website of the Confraternity of Saint James (www.scj.org.uk/route-vezalay.htm) to find information on the route of
Vézelay as one used by Scandinavians, Poles, and Germans.
The French
Government Tourist Office (www.uk.franceguide.com) lists St. Pierre
d’Aulnay-de-Saintonge as being on the main Paris route as well as subsidiary
routes coming from Tours, the North of France, and along the coast.
When we
arrived at the church, other cars from Germany and Switzerland parked next to
us. The church was surrounded by lichen covered graves with no names on
them. The church was small; no doubt it
is what the UNESCO World Heritage site referred to as a “staging post” for
spiritual and physical comfort. I
mentioned to Laurent that pilgrimage routes must have been difficult to
maintain during wars. They were probably reopened as soon as possible by either the church and/or farmers.
As we set out
westward towards the town of Surgères and its weekly market, I wished I could
know where the pilgrimage path was outside Aulnay. I looked out over a wheat field and saw two
deer running freely through it. I could
tell their legs were not crashing into wheat and said, “That is the path to
Santiago de Compostela.”
Wheat fields
abound in the Charente-Maritime département.
There are also fields full of sunflowers and corn. France is not a country where polenta is
made, so I assumed the sunflowers and corn were both used to make oil. Every field looked well cared for on land
that has been reclaimed from marshland. I also noted that there was no garbage
anywhere along the roads inland.
A storm that
sounded like a train descended on the Charente-Maritime that day. However, I slept soundly despite the sounds
of a locomotive roaring past the hotel window, happy with a great day of
history and tourism.
By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
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| Laurent Paget Photograpy |
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| Laurent Paget Photography |
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| Ruth Paget Selfie |
