Pilgrim's Progress – Long Distance Walks in Europe and the UK

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

Robert Louis Stevenson – Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes

I have something to confess. Sleeping in dormitories is not my idea of heaven on earth. Ten years of privation in dormitories at boarding school has quenched any residual desire to spend any more time than strictly necessary in the company of sonorous snorers, bed spring squeeking tossers and turners and weak bladdered souls who spend much of the night shuttling noisily to and fro from the loos.

I somehow survived the night in the communal dormitory at the Relais of St Jacques, but several times during the might I was tempted to go over and strangle an elderly German pilgrim who snored like a drain!

If the cloud did have a silver lining it lay in the fact that I was down for breakfast at 6.15am, packed and out of the door by 7.15am and on my way to Pradelles.

First a few words about the Chemin de Régordane, which I suspect very few people will have heard of, despite the fact that the pilgrimage to St Gilles du Gard was apparently the 4th most popular in Europe during the Middle Ages.

The Régordane was one of the principal trade routes in France from the earliest times, carrying goods, animals and people between the Mediterranean coast and the lands to the north, via the Massif Central.

Mule-carts and flocks of domestic animals made the slow, arduous journey up and down the road, which took the line of least resistance through the mountains, making use of a convenient geological fault.

Julius Caesar found it useful for marching his army to its final showdown with the Gauls. Then in Roman times the surface was improved with solid paving. When Christianity took hold in the mediaeval period, the Régordane became a popular pilgrimage route.

The Régordane Way (GR700) closely follows another route – The Stevenson Way (GR70) that follows the route undertaken in 1878 and described by Robert Louis Stevenson in his book ‘Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes’.

Lots of French walkers undertake the Stevenson Trail but very few bother with the Régordane Way. This basically means two things. Firstly, where the two trails cross (ie Pradelles) it is virtually impossible to find any accommodation during popular times of the year like September. Secondly, it means that unlike the major pilgrom routes, walking the Régordane can be a lonely experience!

During my eight and a half hour walk from Le Puy to Pradelles, I didn’t encounter a single other walker! There were lots of cows, lots of hawks and lots of tractors, but absolutely no walkers until I reached Pradelles which was overrun with them.

There is very little that can be said about today’s walk. The views were panoramic and the walking was on gentle cinder paths across a mainly arable landscape. The few hamlets I passed through were so small that they didn’t even have a church orca village signpost. As a result, for much of the day, I wasn’t entirely certain where I was.

For much of the day I felt as though I was passing through ‘The land that time forgot’. It was difficult to imagine anything of great significance ever having happened over the course of time.

Fields were ploughed and harvested, babies born, married and then died, a pattern that was repeated over hundreds of years. The simplicity of life was highlighted by the names of the roads that I passed – the route of the mill/rock/hawthorn tree/field of a man/the bright carnation etc etc. 

Kostaros (which I passed through at midday) and Landos (which I passed through mid afternoon) were the only two villages of any size that I passed through all day.

As I entered Landos I noticed a number of flyers desperately asking for people to apply to become the village doctor. “Do you have what it takes to work as the doctor in Landos?” I couldn’t, for the life of me, imagine why anybody in their right mind would want to apply fot the position.

Ironically, the place I had tried to book in Pradelles (The Auberge of Mother Cadenette) was the one place in Pradelles that Robert Louis Stevenson visited in 1878. Just under 150 years later, I wasn’t quite so lucky and had to make do with a room in a neighbour’s garage!

And so it was that I ended up staying the night in a small room in somebody’s garage opposite the Auberge of Mother Cadenette. Somehow, it didn’t look quite as good as the real thing!