Hello and salut!
As you may have seen on the news,
France is now back in total lockdown,
but luckily I have been stockpiling some videos,
so today we are back for one more adventure in Saumur
and if it isn’t obvious already,
I’m on a bike
because a little voice in my head said
"Tim, it’s ages since you rode a bicycle.
Why not hire one for the afternoon, go exploring, and make a video about that?
It’s about time you did some content for the Dutch viewers."
So I asked the guy at the hire shop and he said
"yeah head down that way, there’s a route that takes you through some old caves."
"...some old caves..."
Well it is Halloween week after all.
So here I am riding happily through the French countryside.
And of course what I don’t know yet...
- Right. I think things are about to get a little bit different
...is that we are about to meet
the world’s creepiest
cycle path.
- That's a bit dark for a Tim Traveller video
- No, I think he said psyCLEpath
- Oh
We’re riding a route called Le Parcours Troglodytique
or the Troglodyte Trail
and this is the little village of Souzay-Champigny,
a few kilometres from Saumur along the river Loire.
At first glance it looks like your typical quaint old French countryside village
but when you look a bit closer
you do start noticing some unusual things.
Every house in this village seems like it’s being gradually swallowed by the rock behind it;
every house looks someone lives there
but somehow also looks like it’s been abandoned for years;
and every house seems to have its own mysterious cave or tunnel leading into the darkness somewhere.
So let’s pop down this one and see where it goes.
- This is mad
It’s like we’ve discovered a lost world,
an ancient subterranean civilisation.
As you already know
(because you watched my last video about Saumur),
this area has been inhabited since prehistoric times,
but these caves are not quite prehistoric.
In fact, most of them aren’t even natural.
The tunnels here were excavated by humans in the middle ages.
It started round about the year 1000.
Workers extracted limestone from here for use in the construction of chateaux and churches.
But when they were done, they left behind a system of caves and passages
and if you were struggling to afford a home above ground
it made a lot of sense to move in here.
You’re away from the rain and the wind,
the temperature stays at about 14C all year round,
and if you’ve got a cave
all you need to do is build a wall across the front
stick a door in it
and you’ve got a house.
And so it became an underground village in its own right,
and the villagers became known as troglodytes, or cave-dwellers.
There’s even a shopping street, the so-called Rue du Commerce,
an 11th-century subterreanean centre of troglodyte trade,
where - according to this sign - the locals used to sell fruit
and fish.
Can you even imagine the smell?
Despite that, people lived here for hundreds of years,
they dug more and more tunnels,
and excavated more and more stone,
until eventually in the 1800s, with the industrial revolution,
the population started to leave places like this to go and find work in the city.
The caves gradually became deserted,
and the beautiful fertile countryside of the Loire Valley
was left scarred with hundreds of abandoned tunnels and vast dark empty caverns
that remained dry and stayed at a lovely cool temperature all year round.
Well, said the French, what an incredible coincidence!
(So now you know where your bottle of Saumur came from.)
Meanwhile the cycle path is emerging back above ground as well,
and we’ve now reached the end of the official Troglodyte Trail.
But it’s estimated there are as many as 45000 cave dwellings dotted around the Loire region
so there’s loads more to explore.
For me though, it’s time to take the bike back - I need to return it for 6pm.
Huh! Just when the restaurants start to open.
What an incredible coincidence…
If you’d like to ride the Troglodyte Trail
or you just want to raid the wine cellars,
it’s a 20 minute bike ride from the centre of Saumur.
The creepy section through the old subterranean village is not particularly long
and it’s also accessible to walkers or anyone in a wheelchair.
If you need it there’s even a troglodyte toilet.
Thank you very much to Chris and Danielle for appearing in this video,
and if you like my stuff but think it needs more cats,
please do check out Chris’s channel, you will love it.
I’ll put a couple of videos on screen in a moment.
Meanwhile thank you all for watching
and I will see you
soooooooooooooon.
Ok who wrote that?!