By popular request, I am delighted to launch Chapter 1 of The Burgundy Diaries, recounting my experiences living at JB’s organic family farm in beautiful Burgundy before we moved to Château de Bourneau. I will intersperse this series with French lifestyle articles, tips and French hacks I have learned over the years as a hapless English girl living in France. I hope you enjoy it. As always, I am delighted to read all your comments and suggestions for the next chapter…

Chapter 1

It all started with dinner in Paris when I met my future in-laws for the first time.

This was only the second time I had ever been to Paris. The first time was as a 13-year old on a French school trip when I had no interest whatsoever in learning the language. It was also a very coach-to-Eiffel-tower themed excursion (and understandably so. Who in the right mind would want to let 48 13-year-olds loose around a foreign city?) And now I was back 10 years later as the new girlfriend of a Frenchman: English, linguistically inept and fresh off the plane with my French beau in the city of love. JB temporarily suspended his French non-plussed ideas regarding his own capital city and put on his tour guide hat for me. We wandered around all the touristic haunts from Les Jardins de Luxembourg to île de la Cité, the “Amelie” soundtrack playing in my head as we drifted along Canal St. Martin, which then converted to the iconic warble of Edith Piaf’s La vie en rose as we finally ended up beside Le Sacré Coeur with Paris at our feet.

La vie was certainly en rose that evening. A blushed sunset melted into a hot and sultry summer night as the Eiffel tower glittered on the horizon on the hour over the rooftops of Paris and the night-life slowly awakened, as we walked past the surprising vines of Montmartre. That evening, I was being introduced to my future in-laws who had driven specifically to the capital to meet me and take us both back to the family home for a weekend in the Burgundy countryside. In the city of lights, within the artist’s square of Place du Tertre in Montmartre, we had dinner together under the stars as the dynamic energy of Paris bustled in the square, a carnival of waiters and city sounds and garlands of light entirely curated for her tourists.

It is like a filmset, extolling the clichés of France where “Midnight in Paris,” “Amelie” and “Emily and Paris” all meet up and pretend to be genuine. But this doesn’t matter one bit- this is part of the charm of travel and the fun of entertainment. An accordion struck up, champagne popped, glasses chinked over silvery laughter and braying accents. The night smelt like red wine mixed with Gauloises and Chanel No.5. Montmartre clearly received the memo and understood exactly what the tourists needed in their mis en scène, or perhaps us tourists inadvertently brought it ourselves, breezing in with our lashings of French perfume and berets that no Frenchman has ever worn since 1930. It was “Emily in Paris” before her time. To me, it was if I had stepped inside a live Stella Artois advert and was face to face with titi Parisien chic waiters in floor length crisped aprons and bow-ties, tortured artists, chilled beer and berets. Had they rolled in the local mime artist or a depressed French philosopher, my evening would have been complete. It was wonderful.

I didn’t know it then but of course none of this was “real” Paris. (You can read a snippet about the time when I lived in Paris here:)

It was Paris on show, put on for the hoards of tourists like me and at that time, they were mainly Americans and Japanese on a modern European “Grand Tour,” as they selfie’ed their way from monument to monument completely caught up in the stereotype of la vie française. The waiters, well-versed in the act, let us tourists test out our 3 words of French before presenting us with the laminated English tourist menu with snooty aplomb, sure that we’d bungle the exchange rate and leave an outrageous tip.

And then it all changed as JB’s parents arrived. Just a subtle shift in the ambience and the waiter’s attitude because suddenly they realised that despite JB speaking English to me, he was actually one of them. They were real French. A silent understanding passed between them all that seemed to whisper, oui, this is all for show but we can’t break the spell. A little nod and the laminated tourist menus vanished and the real menu arrived en français, leather bound and minus the frogs legs and croque monsieurs. I suddenly felt I was in on the secret and it was even more of a thrill.

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At the time, despite the plaintive attempts of various school French teachers echoing in my past, my French was negligible. However, JB’s parents were effortlessly charming and patient and they never let on that my French was nothing but highly eccentric and highly inaccurate. They kindly interpreted my attempt at conversation and as the wine flowed, I almost lit up a Gaulloise because I felt so genuinely French, I almost thought I was fluent. I was not.

I had used my French “cheat sheet” technique to fake a level higher than I had (which by the way, does work and is how I “suped” up my terrible school-girl French from zero to conversational quite quickly. (Let me know if you want me to share more about learning to speak French quickly and non-academically and I will certainly post about this.) It does wonders for confidence for terrible linguists like myself and the evening had been a success: the eccentric English girl had tried and that was all that mattered.

As the bells tolled the late hour across Paris, we left the restaurant and headed out of Montmartre towards the car to head back to Burgundy. This is was when we inadvertently left the movie set and ended up in the backstreets of Pigalle. Now, for anyone not too familiar with Paris, yes this is the home of the famous Moulin Rouge (again perfectly curated for the tourists) but at the time, the rest of the area was less 19th century can-can and more explicit red light district. Here I was with my future in-laws I had only just met, surrounded by sex supermarkets and couples engaged in questionable public activities. JB’s rather chic Versailles mother marched on ahead with her blinkers firmly in place. We passed by a large sex shop fronted by a mannequin donning latex and a kilt in McLeod hunting tartan (we lived in Edinburgh in those days so this was exceptionally funny.) I tried to control my face but the wine had disturbed my usual professional mask and I stifled a laugh, caught by JB’s dad who exchanged the same moment of humour with me. I then knew, everything would be fine.

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We couldn’t find the car quick enough and then we left the city of lights for the drive back to Burgundy. The roads were empty of traffic at that time of night and we left the motorway and finally merged into winding country roads that traversed the emptiness of rural plains. In the darkness I could make out the changing architecture as we arrived in Burgundy, ancient and unchanged in centuries. Even crossing villages there were no lights and through the darkness of the night they seemed abandoned and tumbled out of fairytale, as the car headlights swept over mustard and umber tiles. It felt to me as if we were time-travelling back 300 years as we wound through dark village after village.

“Are they abandoned?” The Londoner asked from the backseat. The French were bemused. Why did I think that?

“There’s no light.”

“Well no. It’s night.”

Simple, French logic applied. They must have thought I was dense but I was trying to explain that even at night, you still see lights in the British countryside: street lights, shop lights left on, light seeping through from curtains. Lights from pubs, from automatic lights, from garlands in gardens… Not this onyx, pure blackness.

And then JB understood my surprise:

“Ah, it’s because we have shutters here. No light comes through.”

Such a simple difference that had not occurred to me. And apparently villages didn’t have street lights either or if they did, they were turned off. I came from a time when everything was continuously switched on. I didn’t realise there were modern countries that still shutdown at a certain time. London was alive and pulsing with activity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I had just assumed this was the same everywhere.

JB said he lived rurally but as village after village melted into a pitch night, suddenly we were now in plain countryside and endless tracks of darkness. I couldn’t see hedgerows or any buildings on this moonless evening and it felt to a Londoner that they lived on the edge of the earth.

For nine generations, JB’s family have lived and farmed the same land and for seven generations they have all lived in the same family house. This was where JB was brought up, along with his 3 siblings in the middle of a working farm, Clos de Rochy. JB’s father converted the farm to organic in 1987, which was very much ahead of his time and now JB’s older sister, Pauline, and brother, Armand, run the family farm. As far as the eye can see is their land, a child’s paradise of a boundless garden and wholesome activity among the regimented lines of apple and pear trees of the orchards, woods and agricultural plains. At that time, it was still JB’s parent’s home and each generation wall-papered over the last generation’s decor in the main salon. It seemed to me that the bedroom for the master of the house remained political and the seat of power. I nicknamed it the “hatch and dispatch” room, because generations of the family had been born and died in this same bedroom, which to me was absolutely fascinating. When Armand took over the farm, he had to move bedrooms to fulfil the family tradition, like some kind of prophesy and of course, re-paint the salon. The walls echoed with family traditions and stories and perhaps even ghosts...

I still remember my amazement when arriving at Rochy for the first time all those years ago. We had negotiated all those dark, countryside roads and driven up in the pitch darkness to the farm. JB’s childhood Labrador somehow already knew he was coming home and she ignored her arthritic joints to run to meet the car as the wheels crunched over the gravel. As I stepped out of the car, I was immediately hit with the smell of apples and then the most amazing vision in the sky: the boundless galaxy of trillions of milky stars winking against a backdrop of midnight blue velvet. It’s the first time I have ever seen stars without patchy cloud cover and street lamps, giving that orange polluting glow. But here there was no light, just the swarthy darkness and the profuse sparkle of the galaxy that aged 23 I had only just discovered for the first time in my life. Of course, my future in-laws thought I was slightly odd, as I peered up in awe at the heavens, but that moment commenced many similar discoveries of mine as an English city girl arriving in rural France.

I didn’t realise it then but 8 years later, this charming part of rural Burgundy would become our home while we went in search for a chateau…

Best Wishes from Château de Bourneau,

Erin, The Intrepid Châtelaine

PS: As always, do let me know what you would like to hear about. I am always delighted to read all your comments and suggestions.

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Check out my other series and articles in my archives here:

Our cherries are already ripe for picking at Château de Bourneau, blushed by the unseasonably hot sunshine we have had this year in Vendée. Surprisingly, we haven’t had to negotiate with the birds to get a reasonable harvest this year either so I am turning to one of my favourite classic French recipes that I learned when we moved to Jean-Baptiste’s family’s organic farm, Clos de Rochy, in Burgundy, which has been in his family for nine generations.

One year, we had a huge harvest of black cherries from the orchards. In the heat of that golden summer, the rush of ripe cherries scented the air, gourmand and sugary as we rushed to pick baskets of them in the glorious weather, our fingers inked with their sweet and sticky juice. We made jams and compotes, jarring kilos of fruit in old kilner jars that I found in the darkness of the cool farmhouse cellars, following in the footsteps of Jean-Baptiste’s ancestors transforming the glut of summer into stores for winter.

Over the bubbling stove in the farmhouse kitchen, an extra basket of cherries was asking for another recipe, which was when JB’s mother taught me the traditional Clafoutis aux cerises recipe, which is a gorgeous classic French dessert, traditionally made with ripe black cherries.

History

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The strange thing about living in a castle is the direct connection with the past that I feel so keenly. Sometimes it feels like we live frozen in time with long abandoned rooms that have been left untouched in decades. Faded wallpaper peels and folds around lost furniture woven in cobweb. In a desk drawer there is still a key no one remembers and a pen still remains where it was last discarded in the moment, with only a velvet of dust to tell us that this moment was many yesterdays ago.

There are also rooms at Château de Bourneau that feel more like a time slip, as if time is wearing thin in some places and a flash of another era might just seep through with a swish of a silk dress or scent of gardenia. It is as if I enter a room in mid-conversation a century ago, hung on a suspended pause, waiting for me to leave before the conversation restarts again.

The Red Salon in the West wing is particularly atmospheric, wrapped in shadow with the scent of old pages and beeswax in the air. While it is our private salon, we rarely have time to sit and use it and so it remains in parenthesis, like a time capsule under a whisper of dust. Nothing has changed in this room for 160 years - the same portraits hang in the same positions, gazing down from their lofty panels and hung at an angled lean: the best way to display them in an era of low-lit oil lamps. The old clocks are paused and the few remaining pieces of original château furniture are still there. Even if the grand porcelain ginger jars have been lost decades ago, their lids still remain in the same place, as if marking the ghosts of the jars long gone.

The château ancestors gaze down from the walls as if they are keeping a keen eye on our progress, watching curiously as I mend old pieces of furniture and scrub walls from years of dirt and web. I wonder about them and what they were like as people and how they used these spaces in what is now my home, musing on whether there is a story behind the dent in the parquet or the tiny chip on the grand staircase.

As I round my fingers over the cool carved marble of the fireplace, I’m so sure that I am following the curious fingers of one of our château predecessors over 100 years ago also admiring the beauty and workmanship of a long gone artisan.

We have so many questions about the history of our home and when we arrived, we were reliant on verbal history and stories we heard from the village, sifting through fact and fiction. I scoured local archives hoping to find architectural drawings that would help us understand the building better and date certain additions but to no avail. And so I set myself on a mission to restart to collect and build them. No official archives seemed to remain regarding the original Château de Bourneau, built in 1466, or even the current château but I am always on the look out for information and slowly but surely it has a curious way of arriving.

One of our friends is the Viscount of our local town’s château and one evening, a photograph tumbled out of an old book in his library that so happened to be of our home during its construction. It was left in a dusty tome as a bookmark by one of his past ancestors and we wonder what else remains to be discovered.

I’ve always loved history and French ephemera and have spent many happy hours scouring vide greniers and brocantes for cartes postales and letters swirled with cursive script to antique books and gravures. You can read about my treasure-hunting here:

I find that delving into the different historical and cultural world of France is utterly fascinating and I often have this frisson of nostalgia trespassing into another century and into the letters and lives of people long gone. In particular, I am always on the look out for vintage postcards of the château, rifling through old boxes of collected cards in case one of Bourneau lies in wait to be discovered. It’s not just because I find them beautiful and a fascinating insight into social history, learning about the past through the messages sent years ago, these postcards also capture the château in a moment of time and tell us about its structure and how it has been altered architecturally as it has evolved over the last 160 years from a private family home to a military institute in the 1960s. The postcards’ postmark and handwritten dates also provide us with vital clues that help us to estimate when various changes occurred. So far we have been able to narrow down when the chimney alterations and dormer window changes were made and we have also learned that the bell tower was redesigned along with the moat bridge, which we never knew.

These postcards even tell the story of the evolving landscape gardening and how our ruined orangery looked a century ago, which we could only guess at before. All these details enrich our growing archives and help inform our restoration to bring the château back to its former glory in the most sensitive way as possible and how the original architect, Arsène Charier, designed the château to be viewed, which also includes the landscaping of the grounds.

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Unexpected discoveries

My search for these postcards has been a lone game so you can imagine my pleasure when one day, a letter arrived at the château out of the blue from a stranger who had happened upon a postcard of Château de Bourneau from 1905 that had somehow made its way into a dresser in Canada and had kindly thought to return it to France. I wrote about this extraordinary kindness in my social media and then unexpectedly, other kind strangers from all over the world started to join the search and to graciously send us postcards of our home that they had also stumbled across in flea-markets or even family archives. It is amazing to think that photographs of our home can be found in drawers on the other side of the world, posted over 100 years ago when a relative visited our region of Vendée. Little by little I am growing our collection and archives to help preserve the past and inform the restoration of the future.

There is something particular special about French old houses that make dreamers of all of us. I think our guests feel it too, daydreaming of another era in the quiet, sun-drenched afternoons. It is that reassuring sense of permanence in houses that have seen centuries fly by and yet remain impervious to the outside world, frozen in their own time. I love the beauty of the tiny details of French fixtures and fittings, the delicately carved doorknobs, window handles and shutter fastenings shaped like 18th century ladies that escaped the 1970s refurbishments. The hand-carved panelling, ornate ceiling plasterwork and richly patterned parquets speak of another century but they never lose style, even in a 21st century home. I am grateful to each generation that did their part in preserving the château and now it is our turn to be the guardians of the estate for this generation, adding our conversations to the old walls.

And perhaps in another hundred years time, the next châtelains will wonder about us or curse me for my choice of wallpaper!

Best Wishes from Château de Bourneau,

Erin, The Intrepid Châtelaine

You can find previous articles in my archives here.

PS: It is soon time to start my new series. What would you like to hear about? The Burgundy diaries at JB’s organic family farm? French lifestyle? Local history? I am always interested to hear your thoughts.

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PPS: There will be a bonus publication this week as a thank you to our kind paid subscribers who directly contribute to the restoration of Château de Bourneau. We are so grateful for your generous support.

This week is a very busy wedding week at Château de Bourneau as we prepare the grounds and château to host a beautiful wedding weekend for a lovely couple in the middle of an unexpected heatwave. Given the unremitting heat that has arrived out of nowhere (I was wearing woollies only a few days ago and now it’s climbing to 38C in the middle of the day) we have been starting our long days much earlier in the morning to tackle the list to avoid being cremated alive in the midday sun.

All château plans have a tendency to be interrupted by the daily curved balls thrown liberally in our direction and yesterday morning was no different. As I ran down the long list, my breakfast was interrupted by squawking coming from somewhere inside the château kitchen. JB wondered if it was just the usual transmitted sound echoing down the chimney from our corvid friends having their usual heated debate on our chimney pot in what we surmise is some kind of bird daily council meeting. It often involves a lot of raucous shouting and then some of the party storming out of the session in a huff. A sort of bird version of BBC parliament, if you will.

However, this time, the squawking seemed louder and closer. Suddenly, our second-in-command cat, Henri, was getting deliciously excited beside the kitchen log burner. It all went quiet and then a startling thud onto the chimney platform made us jump and we realised that somehow a bird had managed to get between the tubing of our log burner and the chimney and then fall 16M onto the fireplace platform that seals the chimney space around the log burner. We didn’t know how long the poor bird had been trapped there but what we did know was that the long list of daily tasks for the wedding week had once again been bumped down the list as JB realised he would now have to take apart the log burner installation, which was definitely not on the plan today. Henri and Oscar got temporarily escorted away (to avoid more delicious thoughts) and JB got embroiled in a job he really didn’t need to do that morning. Half an hour later, I suddenly found myself presented with a weak, blue-eyed fledging, blinking at me through a puff of soot and fluffy feathers.

My level of ornithology is shamefully poor, and I am certainly no vet, but this is not the first time I have had to research the local fauna and learn how I can revive or feed an abandoned baby animal. Unfortunately, in rural France, we don’t have the plethora of wildlife associations or veterinary services interested in helping wildlife in the same way as what I was used to in the UK, so over the years, I’ve just realised that I have to try and step up to give these poor creatures some chance of survival.

Bats in the Belfry

My usual required medical services relate to our protected bat population who tend to hang out (literally) in our medieval cellars and sleepily exit through the air vents to eat insects around the moat. I am pretty sure that it is partially thanks to them that we never have a mosquito problem here in the height of summer. However, bats can get quite easily dehydrated in summertime, due to their large surface area from their wingspan, and so it’s not uncommon for me to find a partially conscious tiny bat that has face-planted and is splayed on the floor like they’ve splat-landed. Rescuing a dehydrated bat has become a routine admission for me in my bat intensive care unit. I pick them up with thick, vet-handling gloves and transfer them to my ICU and gently rehydrate them with a syringe and then it’s breakfast in bed. It is always such a delight seeing these dying creatures suddenly back to hanging upside down again from my ICU and then I know that they’re feeling much better and will have a swift discharge back to our cellars where they hang out between the wine racks like all good French.

They rarely bother us inside the château, unless the windows have been left open on a summer’s night or the one particular bat, who we called Bruce (of course) who seemed to have found a rather cosy nook hanging upside down on our curtain rail in our bedroom. We probably wouldn’t have noticed him napping behind the velvet 4.5M up if it wasn’t for his reduced nasal passages. I kept hearing this regular high pitched “eee-ah-eee-ah” sound coming from somewhere and on investigation, I found it was just a snoring bat and we let him stay as a resident mosquito guard.

In the Red Salon, the occasional circling bat certainly adds to the gothic atmosphere with our austere portraits as they circuit the room. One of our friends rushed to tell us that one of the portraits “was moving” and of course a thrill of the supernatural ran through the group only to find that a bat (probably Bruce again) was camping behind a frame and had just dislodged it.

As a Londoner, living in rural France has been such a wonderful discovery for me and has also highlighted my countryside ignorance. I still have this childlike amazement at all the wonderful flora and fauna we have at Bourneau. We have a barn owl that roosts at the château and who made his appearance known by a 2am shrill welcome shriek on our first ever night we spent at the château:

You can read about that here:

Every morning we awake to an orchestra of birdsong or the corvid parliament on the roof and the evenings bring the Nightingale’s lullaby. Red squirrels still live here, hedgehogs regularly stroll by at night and I’ve seen yellow flashes of regal salamanders hiding in piles of leaves. Many of you enjoyed meeting JB’s golden pheasant friend on instagram the other day. He calls him Super Pheasant, due to his superhero mask-like markings, and he joins him most mornings and evenings when he hears the sound of JB’s tractor and comes running with his chatty squawks.

There’s a wading heron that dips in our moat looking for breakfast every morning and our forest is home to deer, hares and wild boar. We have thousands of fish in the moat, including Angus the rogue goldfish who hangs out with shoals of carp. We also have a pair of ducks that only ever seem to visit during French school half term, timed to the literal day!

There are also many animals and creatures I have never seen before in my life. I once saw what looked like a giant squirrel run vertically up a wall and I thought someone had spiked the rosé until JB told me it was a “loir” which is some naughty roof-nesting kind of rodent. We once had un ragondin living in our moat that we called Rasputin (also a naughty boy) who nonchalantly swam around the moat and looked me dead in the eye with a sassy, complete disregard to our presence. He liked to excavate our medieval moat wall, which wasn’t ideal, until one day he moved house and is probably now happily destroying one of our neighbours’ lakes instead.

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I even love how the slugs here are ginger and not grey. They make me laugh every time (not that I have any issue with gingers) but because they are so surprising to me.

Our first year, we suddenly had a garden full of mini-frogs that materialised out of nowhere, as if one of the plagues of Egypt had resurrected just before our high season. We found them bounding around all over the lawns and a group of them then somehow arrived inside the château. I found them hanging out in a random plastic crate that had been left in one of the forgotten rooms (which I soon discovered served the important purpose of collecting the toilet water that was leaking through the ceiling) but they were enjoying splashing around in it like it was some kind of hammam. Well, at least some folk around here were delighted by this disastrous discovery.

There is such a distinct seasonality of Nature as well here from the call of the cuckoo heralding early Spring or returning swallows, to the darting lizards and susurrations of cicadas that usher in the heat of summer. It’s like a new soundtrack that someone just switched on one evening. And then we have le brame du cerf, which is the bark of the rutting stag, calling for a mate. Its throaty echo resonates through our forest like a deep melancholic sigh, abruptly confirming the seasonal shift to Autumn, if a long, Indian summer had you doubt it.

Even the insect life here fascinates me and returns me to child-like awe when I see a marching lines of red “gendarmes” which are a kind of red and black beetle that I think are so beautiful. We’ve had a swarm of bees checking out our chimney for a new hive. I’ve seen Stag horn beetles and a preying mantis for the first time, dragon flies, funny caterpillars and hairy millipedes plus numerous rainbow species of moths and butterflies floating around our wildflower meadow. I once saw what I thought was some child’s LED toy left out in the garden which actually turned out to be a glowworm.

They are all a part of the fabric of our home that we share with such diverse and wonderful wildlife, which is why we are so careful with the home and garden products we use to maintain our happy, organic ecosystem.

And so here I am in the middle of a heatwave on wedding week with a million tasks to do sitting on a roof with what I think is a baby jackdaw. I spent my evening reading about corvids, what they eat and their intelligence and parenting. Many kind people from all over the world reached out to me on instagram with such thoughtful advice and links and I have learned a lot from feeding this little guy every hour(!) who seems very happy to hang out with me and at the cusp of learning to fly. He also has quite bougie tastes- so far prosciutto and strawberries seem to be a firm favourite and we did also have scrambled eggs for breakfast. Apparently, jackdaw parents will look for their lost fledgling and will continue to feed them until they can fly and forage for themselves. So, after some rehydration we went to sit on the roof (away from my mini-tigers) to see if his caws alerted his parents. It struck me that this is another one of those “château moments” and how we too are part of our own funny ecosystem. I started playing a YouTube soundtrack of jackdaw “chat” to try and get the baby to talk more and overhead, a swoop of possible jackdaws seemed alerted and were casing the joint. I hope the YouTube recording wasn’t anything rude in jackdaw but I felt such a thrill of possibility that this mad plan might actually work so I quickly left my little friend with some snacks and hid, so his parents might dare to go to him on the roof. I popped back an hour later to see an adult hopping along the roof and had to restrain myself from whooping with joy but crossed all my fingers and toes that my little rescue was now “flight ready” to join his people again.

Meanwhile, I got back to the tasks at hand, scrubbed stairs, moved furniture, collected laundry and darted between scorching sun and dappled shade in this unremitting heat. Finally, I went back to check on my friend, that you all named in a vote as Jacques D’Or, which I think is exceptional!

I have been hoping all day that the adults hadn’t rejected him and had found the snacks and taken him under their wing (literally). A similar wedding week 2 years ago, we ended up accepting a cocktail drinks invitation that resulted in us coming home with a dirty abandoned kitten that wasn’t yet weaned. I had to syringe feed him between the arrival of the bride and the champagne reception, which wasn’t the most convenient moment to adopt a kitten, but Henri has grown up into a longhaired handsome boy who is the naughtiest but also the cuddliest little chap and very much part of our family. Was this history repeating? Would I now be that mad English woman with a hand reared jackdaw sitting on my shoulder? I returned to the roof. The snacks were gone and so far, it looks like we did it and my little friend, Jacques D’Or, has rejoined his family.

This evening, the jackdaws are soaring over the château and calling to each other and I wonder if I can hear that little peep demanding prosciutto now he’s back on the chimney stack where he belongs.

Best Wishes from Château de Bourneau,

Erin, The Intrepid Châtelaine

PS

Do tell me what you would like to hear about next. How about a series on The Burgundy Diaries about my time at JB’s family organic farm before we found the château? Or more recipes or French tips? I’d love to hear your suggestions.

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It was a beautiful Sunday morning when JB announced that we would have an unexpected equine guest that afternoon stopping over at Château de Bourneau. At the time, some British friends of ours were staying with us on holiday and so over buttery croissants and tea in the château kitchen, we all queried why a horse was coming to visit.

“Oh, it’s just our neighbour asking us if we don’t mind one of the pilgrims grazing their horse over lunch hour.”

This naturally prompted many amused questions from our guests wondering what century we lived in but by this time, I was quite used to the vagaries of château life with all its eccentricities and so the odd pilgrim walking or riding past our gates was relatively commonplace.

St Jacques de Compostelle

It just so happens that the famous pilgrimage route of St. Jacques de Compostelle or “The Way of St. James” passes right in front of Château de Bourneau. This is a network of Christian pilgrimage routes that crosses Europe and leads to the shrine of the apostle St. James in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, North-West Spain. You may also notice the scallop shell of St. James on signs or carved into trees along this route.

For over a thousand years, pilgrims have followed these routes as a form of spiritual journey and penitence but these days, it is also popular with hikers and sporty tourism looking for an epic challenge traversing Europe that attracts over 200,000 people each year. Not everyone follows the full network but we do often see pilgrims walking past our home on their travels along the French route.

“Will they need anything from us?” I asked, with a sliver of secret hope in my voice that for once on a Sunday I didn’t have to be at the behest of anyone else and could have a day off and enjoy the company of our friends who we rarely see and so far in their holiday, we had not had the chance to properly spend time with them. The past week had been exhausting juggling filming, holiday cottage turnovers, client visits, maintenance and hosting amid the usual barrage of mad emails ranging from battle re-enactment societies, mushroom pickers and poetry and so I didn’t have the energy to ramp up my stores for the next oddity. Could I just have one day without having to deal with weird? Was all I asked.

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JB reassured us that all that had been requested was a bucket of water for the horse to drink and they would be on their way and so it seemed that this would be a nice quiet Sunday after all and I relaxed into the swing of a French slow Sunday of good food with good friends. Breakfast segued into a delightful slow French lunch and we continued chatting as our friend got up from the table to pick up a book to continue our languid afternoon.

It was only then that I thought I could hear music.

“Is there a radio on upstairs?” I asked.

No one else seemed to hear anything and so I dismissed this as another funny quirk of the château and its echoes. But then I heard it again, louder and more distinctly this time.

“Can’t you hear singing?”

As soon as the question left my mouth, our friend came bounding back into the kitchen with his book:

“Er…you might want to see this. It appears that the Virgin Mary is on your bridge…”

Of course we scrambled up from the table and followed our friend into the Red Salon to join him beside the window to see what was going on. Amid a throng of singing boy scouts, a priest inexplicably in cowboy hat, a grazing horse and various people having a picnic, was a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary mounted on a cart covered in floral tributes centred on our moat bridge.

“What’s going on?” I said agog barely above a whisper, unsure how “a pilgrim and his horse” had somehow morphed into 100 people on a pilgrimage in our garden, as said horse munched through our garden borders.

“Looks like a pilgrimage is happening at your house,” our friend said in such a serious British matter-of-fact manner, as if this was a completely normal occurrence on a Sunday afternoon, that we all burst out laughing. I had visions of the unexpected folk dancing session that had occurred here without warning on another occasion and it appeared that once again, we had not received the memo.

You can read about the morning I woke to find this surprise folk-dancing welcome here in Chapter 3:

I turned to JB “Any idea why a full on pilgrimage has arrived in our garden?”

I was pretty sure there were no registered sightings of the Virgin Mary here since if so, the estate agent would have been sure to include that asset in the same way that Joan of Arc allegedly had a nap under the trees of most châteaux in France it seems.

JB had no idea either so it looked like we were going to have to venture out and find out what was going on. I sighed, waving goodbye to my slow Sunday and I supposed it meant that I had to get properly dressed to face this latest situation, hoping that whatever this was wasn’t disturbing our clients staying in the holiday cottages.

As I returned to our bedroom to get changed, I spotted a familiar car advancing along the drive.

“No, it can’t be…”

When we had first arrived at Château de Bourneau, we had met some fellow châtelains and had invited them to drop by one afternoon when they were free to see our project. Naturally, today seemed to be The Day and indeed the very minute they had decided to honour the call. I quickly threw on a summer dress and rushed onto the château courtyard to meet them, forgetting that the pilgrimage was in the middle of a Mass. Everyone was kneeling as I burst forth from behind the Virgin Mary to meet our friends who were slaloming between kneeling body scouts with looks of abject confusion. They tiptoed past the floral tributes as I quickly ushered them inside and JB waited for a respectful moment to enter the fray and ask what was actually going on.

“So, what on earth…?” Our friends began, as I closed the front door, slow smiles creeping across their faces.

“Honestly, I have no idea,” I answered and went to boil the kettle and introduce them to our British guests. I launched the château tour just as JB returned with a French couple I vaguely recognised but couldn’t place from where. It just so happened that this Sunday was clearly The Sunday of Random Visits and they were friends of JB’s parents who had also decided that today was the day to rock up from Burgundy literally at the same time. My British friends found this whole situation hilarious as JB and I set out on 2 different tours of the château in 2 different languages to the dulcet tones of the Agnes Dei continuing from the garden.

Once the Mass (and the unexpected tours) had finished, we all went outside together. Someone had set up a BBQ and offered me a sausage. Someone else gave me a prayer tract and a religious bracelet. Somehow my French pilgrimage vocabulary was pretty limited for Small Talk and in fact, most of my grasp of the language had flown away with the surprise appearance of a group of nuns that had materialised at my elbow. I attempted an inelegant foray into polite French and asking about the full sized statue of the Virgin Mary but accidentally said “la verge” rather than “la Vierge” which means penis.

So, all in all, it was going extremely well.

JB returned to my side:

“How’s it going?”

“Well, I’ve just said penis to a nun and for some reason accepted a sausage from a stranger at a surprise BBQ in my garden. But otherwise, everything is completely normal. Have you discovered if there was a visitation from the Virgin on our bridge or what exactly is going on?”

“No visitation but we are apparently part of the ‘M” of Mary on some map.”

It was all as clear as mud.

“And the guy with the horse?”

“Yeah, so the main part of the story wasn’t explained.”

“Tu m’etonnes,” I said peering at the 100 people handing out prayer tracts in my garden while the BBQ was getting underway. Clearly, I’d picked up more French irony than useful vocabulary.

It turned out that the pilgrim with the horse was the guy pulling the statue of the Virgin Mary. I saw our neighbour eating burger and asked if they knew anything about this.

“Oh yes,” she exclaimed. “There are posters about it all over the village. Lovely day for a pilgrimage.”

Once again, we had not been invited to our own event. Well, in these situations I find it best to shake off the vestiges of normal, don’t ask too many questions and just join in! It was time to open a bottle of rosé, grab a picnic rug and embrace the culture and be a part of whatever this was and so we all had a lovely afternoon at the surprise pilgrimage.

That night over dinner, our friends laughed and laughed about the unexpected turn our quiet Sunday had taken and how these things kept happening to us. I don’t know how we somehow missed the invite and posters to our own pilgrimage apparently plastered around our village but we made the most of the experience and it’s never happened again since!

And then the phone rang. Our château colleagues down the road were asking why there was a statue of the Virgin Mary on their lawn and some boy scouts pitching tents.

“Apparently, they’ve been sent from Bourneau.”

We, of course, denied all knowledge of this and laughed until the small hours of the morning. It is true to say that there is never a dull moment here!

Best Wishes from Château de Bourneau,

Erin, The Intrepid Châtelaine

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If you have missed the start of this series called “Château Beginnings” or would like to catch up on any of my other series, do check out my archives here for past chapters and articles.

You can read about our 1st night at the château here:

There were some pieces of discarded furniture left in the attics but the château had already gone through three major c…

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My last chapter of Château Beginnings, about the art of the French apéro, had many of you messaging me about French apéro recipes and if there were any unique bakes that you could try in your own kitchen to make your summer drinks parties a little more français and chic. Well, good news, mes amis, because I have one of my favourite French discoveries t…

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When I first moved to France, I didn’t know about the cultural importance surrounding “The Apéro.” In our first months living at Château de Bourneau, a kind neighbour invited us over to their home for an “apéro” at 7.30pm. I graciously accepted but in truth, I had no idea what this was and expected Jean-Baptiste to know. However, JB had mainly “adulted”…

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Before we found Château de Bourneau, we had lunch with a family friend who owns a château in Burgundy. Over a crisp Chablis in the afternoon sunshine, he gave us some insightful pointers about the practicalities of running big estates, renovation and business. [You can read more about our Château shoppi…

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The first mad summer season at Château de Bourneau catapulted us into the fray of running our 4 holiday cottages but as autumn descended into winter, we finally came up for air and used the quietude as a moment to consider our next projects, sorted into the essential and the grand wish-list. The 1980s boiler was still inexplicably grumbling along provid…

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It’s 2am and a storm is raging outside, whipping through the lined poplars and tearing around the turrets of Château de Bourneau. Horizontal rain batters the windows with the rush and whip of a rising wind, whistling and rattling the old frames which is keeping me awake. Sheet lightning illuminates the estate with a po…

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The arrival of the primroses heralds the start of the busy Spring activities at Château de Bourneau when we begin the gargantuan task of bringing the Château, and its estate, out of its winter hibernation. The lawns need mowing, the four swimming pools need cleaning, filtering and scrubbing. The …

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Fast forward months of eye-watering paperwork, tackling the French favourite sport of illogical and disorganised bureaucracy, we finally signed for Château de Bourneau at 10pm at the end of July 2018, just before the entirety of France closed for Au…

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This is the final instalment of the château shopping series. You can read the previous chapters via the links at the bottom of the page.

Excitement for the up-coming visit to Château de Bourneau reached fever-pitch and the longest two weeks of my life. I knew that behind the scenes, back in Vendée, multiple visits could be h…

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Cha…

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