There’s a simple reason why the French take such long lunch breaks. It’s
because lunch takes so long to eat.
My girlfriend and I were in northern France to visit Mont St Michel, and we’d
stopped for lunch in the Breton fishing port of Cancale. But judging by what
the waitress had just put on our table, I doubted that we’d reach the Mont
for another week.
Our two-person plateau de fruits de mer was piled high with a whole spider
crab, oysters, sea snails, scallops, langoustines and crab claws. I was
tempted to ask whether the waitress hadn’t given us the order for the party
of eight at the next table. My better half thought differently.
“Oh, there aren’t many oysters,” she complained. She’s French, after all.
The platter looked magnificent, but it also represented lots of work. We had
to pick flesh out of every corner of the spider crab’s shell, extract each
sea snail with a spike, dismember the langoustines, and — worst of all —
break open the crab claws with nutcrackers without lacerating our fingers on
the broken edges.
One time-saving tip, though — you don’t have to eat the seaweed. You will
provoke titters of amusement from your fellow lunchers and the whole waiting
staff if you attempt to chew your way through a length of kelp. Don’t ask me
how I know.
Cancale is a wonderful place to have lunch. It’s been nominated a “site
remarquable du goût” — goût meaning taste. Even the picnics here are
extraordinary. At the landward end of the main jetty, there’s a small market
with a few stalls selling nothing but local oysters, starting at about £2 a
dozen, roughly the price you’d pay for a solo oyster in London.
The locals bring a bottle and glasses, buy a dozen oysters, then picnic by the
beach. What a brilliant idea, I thought. No soggy sandwiches, no squashed
cake, just oysters and champagne. Essence of picnic.
Driving on towards Mont St Michel, you understand why the food is so good in
Cancale, as it is in the whole region. Not only are there still active
fishing ports, the area is also amazingly productive, so that practically
everything on the menus, apart from chocolate, wine and exotic fruits, is
probably grown or caught within 50 miles or so. They produce cheese, pâtés,
sausages, chicken, cider and endless varieties of vegetable.
There’s also a speciality in the Baie de St Michel — naturally salted lamb
from sheep raised on the tidal meadows. Out beyond the dykes that protect
the fertile reclaimed land from the tides, you can see large flocks of
black-faced sheep grazing hungrily, not realising that all they’re doing is
saving future diners the trouble of reaching for the condiment set.
Further inland, we drove past huge fields of green vegetables, including one
of lettuces that appeared to be wearing white condoms. To stop them being
too fertile, perhaps? And in late spring, it’s not just the food plants that
are flourishing. The countryside is alive with saffron-yellow gorse, purple
irises and pink apple blossom, and the sleepy villages look as if they are
neck-deep in vegetation.
There comes a time, though, when you stop thinking about plant life. This is
as soon as you catch sight of Mont St Michel itself, from about 10 miles
away. At first, it looks like a faint blue volcano, its base hovering above
the horizon, a mirage beamed across the planet from Hawaii. It is an awesome
sight, and you can only guess how otherworldly it must have looked to
medieval pilgrims heading this way on foot after they’d seen nothing but
low-rise cottages and even lower-rise cabbages all week.
As you draw nearer, details begin to emerge — angles, textures and colours.
You realise that it can’t possibly be a volcano, because it has castle
battlements and a golden spire. Although, theoretically, given an infinite
number of volcanoes, I suppose one of them would eventually spout lava in
the shape of battlements and a spire, with maybe even a golden statue of St
Michael on top.
Once you get within five miles or so, however, your admiration for the awesome
spectacle dulls slightly, as you realise that Mont St Michel is going to be
a bit touristy. Like Jacques Chirac stubbing out his Gauloise in an empty
Pernod glass is a bit French.
The approach roads bristle with billboards screaming at you to stop at
Mont-related restaurants, hotels, camp sites, distilleries, biscuit
factories, even — bizarrely — a “Reptilarium”, presumably a place to drop
off any kids who have been moaning “Are we there yet?” since you left the
M25. The crocodile on that billboard looked like a child-eater.
Driving even closer, you want to stare up at the soaring medieval abbey on its
260ft rock, but you have to keep your eyes on the cars swerving to the side
of the road for a photo stop — ignoring all the “no stopping” signs. This is
France, after all.
The car park is immense, and runs alongside about half a mile of the causeway
between the Mont and the mainland. It is stupendously ugly, but from 2008,
it will no longer be there. The plan is to bring the car parks inland and
run shuttles along a causeway that will be underwater at high tide. They
want to return the Mont to nature, and it will look even more breathtaking
than it does now, because you’ll no longer see rows of coaches sitting like
giant maggots waiting for their bite at the apple.
Not that the coaches — or any other vehicles — are allowed into the apple.
Continued on page 2
()As we had reserved a hotel room inside the battlements, we were told that we
could drive through to car-park area one, almost at the foot of the outer
castle wall. Area one costs the same as the other car parks (£2.75 a day),
but is exclusively for those staying overnight. As nobody was checking,
though, lots of suspiciously luggageless people were parking there too. This
is France, after all.
It was now late on a sunny Saturday afternoon, and the crush of pedestrians at
the entrance gate felt like sale day at Ikea. Inside the portcullis, though,
was where I had a real panic attack. The narrow street winding up the hill
was clearly of medieval origin, but it was lined with the tackiest souvenir
shops this side of Dolly Parton’s World of Silicone.
Calm down, I tried to tell myself. Pilgrimages have always attracted sellers
of tack. Back in the Middle Ages, pilgrims were doubtless urged to buy
inflammable witch dolls and “I survived the Black Death” codpieces. So the
Mont’s medieval theme means that it is quite natural for the shops to sell
whole suits of replica armour (£2,000), immense metal sabres (great for
Junior to play with in the back of the car), plaster gargoyles and garden
statues of St Michael, large and hideous enough to knock 20% off the value
of your house.
But courage, as the French say. After leaving our bags at the hotel (see
Travel brief, right), we climbed a stone stairway beside the tiny cemetery
and suddenly we were alone in an empty medieval citadel. Gabled stone houses
surrounded us, the vast abbey loomed above, and nobody was trying to sell us
a life-size Excalibur. We wound our way up the small alleyways and saw
hardly a soul until we reached the entrance to the abbey itself.
By this time we were halfway up the mount, yet still at the foot of the
massive inner fortress walls.
And the abbey is a real fortress. According to the official leaflet, St
Michael was (before he became a purveyor of English underwear and prepared
meals) “head of the heavenly militia”, defending good Christian souls
against the devils who wanted to drag them to hell. A sort of divine Bruce
Willis.
The Mont has been dedicated to St Michael since the year 708, when the bishop
of Avranches, a town on the eastern side of the bay, dreamt that the saint
wanted him to build a church there. “I have a dream,” he probably told the
local builders. “No problème, mate,” they doubtless replied, “we’ll have it
done by next Tuesday.”
In the event, it took them several centuries. They were builders, after all.
This being northern France, over the years the abbey had to be fortified to
defend it against invading Englishmen. And the French are very keen on big
public building projects, so they just couldn’t stop adding on new chapels,
towers, cloisters and, of course, refectories. Today, as you wander through
the multilayered labyrinth of the abbey’s passages, you jump centuries like
a time traveller — 13th, 11th, 15th, back to 11th again.
To be fair, the builders turned in a top-class architectural job — even if it
did need extensive renovation in the 19th century — but Mother Nature helped
them out, too. Standing on the terrace near the top of the Mont, you get
unbroken views for miles out to sea. Or, at low tide, out to sand.
The sea disappears way over the horizon, and you gaze out at a sublime expanse
of cream- coloured sand as huge as the sky, with the sun flashing off the
streams that meander out in search of the Channel. If you fancy a swim at
low tide, you’ve got a 10-mile walk ahead of you.
Mind you, you’d either disappear in quicksand or be drowned by the rising tide
first. Which is why it was strange to see hordes of people wandering across
the sands, some of them a good mile or so away.
Every year, the helicopter is called out to rescue foolhardy sand-walkers, and
at the foot of the Mont, there are large signs giving warnings such as (and
I quote) “Accès dangereux”, “Quicksand” and “Danger! Keep out!”. These are
repeated in French, English, German and Spanish, and accompanied by
appropriate pictograms, such as an arm waving goodbye as its owner sinks
into the goo.
Perhaps, I thought, the walkers are people who can’t understand any of the
four languages, or the pictograms. But no, they can’t all be autistic
Moldovans.
Later, I decided to see what the fuss was about, and went for a short stroll
on the flats. It was undeniably pleasant to feel the hard sand beneath my
feet, and to let the mud in the shallower channels ooze between my toes,
though I still didn’t understand why I was being allowed to dice with death
in this way. In England, at the very least there would be men in suits
cruising about on mini-hovercraft, distributing business cards and telling
people: “If one of your party disappears, call me and we’ll sue the butt off
the tourist board.”
Yet when I asked the man in the tourist office about all this, he just gave an
existentialist shrug and said: “Some are with guides. The others?” — repeat
shrug — “What can we do? We can’t send a gendarme after all of them.” This
is France, after all. Let them eat sand.
Stephen Clarke is the author of A Year in the Merde (Black Swan
£6.99)
Getting there: with Brittany Ferries (0870 536 0360,
www.brittany-ferries.co.uk), overnight crossings from Portsmouth to St Malo
start at £245 for a car and two passengers, including cabin; a daytime
crossing from Portsmouth to Caen starts at £190. Irish Ferries (0818 300
400, www.irishferries.com) has crossings from Rosslare to Cherbourg from
€147 for a car and two passengers.
Where to stay: La Mère Poulard (00 33-2 33 89 68 68,
www.merepoulard.com) is a three-star hotel within the walls of Mont St
Michel; doubles start at £150, B&B. Its walls are decorated with
photos of famous guests, including a double portrait of Mrs Thatcher and
President Mitterrand. Did Denis know about this? Five miles east of the Mont
is the peaceful Manoir de la Roche Torin (02 33 70 96 55,
www.manoir-rochetorin.com), where doubles start at £110, half-board. Its
excellent restaurant has a great sunset view across the meadows to the Mont.
If your room doesn’t face that way, no problem — channel 1 on the television
offers a webcam view.
Where to eat: in Cancale, try one of the restaurants on the
harbourfront, but beyond the car parks — unless, of course, your favourite
mealtime view is a row of Renaults. Jullouville is a small resort just south
of Granville, on the way down the west Normandy coast from Cherbourg. It is
home to La Promenade (02 33 90 80 20; closed Monday and Tuesday), one of the
rare restaurants on this coast with a terrace actually on the prom, rather
than looking out over a road. A gastronomic two-course lunch (fish main
course, freshly made dessert) will cost less than £27pp, including wine and
coffee.
