The Motor Routes of France: To the Châteaux of Touraine, Biarritz, the Pyrenees, the Riviera, & the Rhone ValleyHome, Gordon
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The Motor Routes of France: To the Châteaux of Touraine, Biarritz, the Pyrenees, the Riviera, & the Rhone Valley
Home, Gordon
Automobile travel -- France -- Guidebooks; France -- Description and travel
Notre Dame, the other church, is chiefly in the Classic style of the
latter half of the sixteenth century. It contains a fine altar-tomb of
1146, bearing the recumbent effigy of St. Gautier, Abbé of Meulan, with
four angels swinging censers. There is also an ancient Madonna which
attracts pilgrims to the church.
* * * * *
Leaving Pontoise by the road to Gisors, one passes through several
picturesque villages. The first is Cormeilles-en-Vexin, whose church
(partly twelfth century), with big flying buttresses and gargoyles,
stands out prominently over the green and wooded country as the village
is approached.
There are two or three stretches of paving-stones on this road,
necessitating a slow pace to avoid dislocating every part of the car and
its occupants, and there is thus plenty of time to enjoy the rural charm
of the red-roofed villages, the big picturesque farms, and the extensive
woods.
Marines is a small village with a seventeenth-century château containing
a notable staircase. It belonged to Chancellor Sillory, who was
Chancellor of France under Henri IV. In the church is the
sixteenth-century chapel of St. Roch, standing over an octagonal crypt.
Three short stretches of _pavé_ follow after leaving Marines, then the
road drops down through a cutting in yellow sandstone to Chars (on the
River Voisne), where there is a church of the twelfth and fourteenth
centuries. The earlier work is worth studying, and there is also an
interesting tomb to Jeanne de Ferrières, of the fourteenth century.
Passing over a level-crossing, the village of Bouconvilliers lies on the
left. It has a large farm of the Sussex Downs type, sheltered by big
trees, a church with a Romanesque tower, and a castle of the time of
Louis XIII. (seventeenth century) on the site of a much earlier one, of
which the entrenchments remain.
Just beyond the hamlet of Lierville (on the left) five roads meet. The
direct way to Gisors is straight ahead, but a notice warns one of bad
paving-stones, and recommends going to the right through
Chaumont-en-Vexin. By doing so the distance is only slightly increased,
and the _pavé_ is entirely avoided.
The road winds down steeply into the leafy hollow in which the little
town of Chaumont-en-Vexin stands. Its church, with a curious Classic
tower of stumpy proportions, contains rich Flamboyant work, and is
conspicuous on the shoulder of a hill above the houses.
There are remains of the eleventh-century castle where some of the
French kings resided when the Norman frontiers were defended by a chain
of castles. In the chief street there is a picturesque sixteenth-century
house of timber-framing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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