Author: Thom

On the way to Conques and just past the church in Saint-Marcel, I passed by this rather famous donkey. Many travel writers and pilgrims have written about this noisy beast. The writer of my guidebook, Dave Whitson, even described him as a “brilliant conversationalist“. He certainly startled me! Despite the backpack, I’m pretty sure I jumped into the air. The […]

The village of Saint-Marcel consists of ten houses and a tiny, narrow church. This was originally a chapel of a much larger (presumably monastic) structure, which was already in ruins in the 16th century. After the Revolution, even this little remnant was allowed to decay to the point that it was essentially rebuilt in the late 19th / early 20th […]

When entering the village of Saint Marcel, I was confronted by this sign. Now, I only speak about fifty words of French, and about half of those are wrong, so my immediate thought was that I was being cautioned that eclairs were extinct in this village – presumably because the local bakery went out of business. What it actually says, […]

I saw this sign as I was walking on a rural road, approximately 300 meters before arriving in the village of Saint-Marcel. I think it speaks for itself. It does rather look like a large herbivore has been gnawing on it, though. Date: 27 August 2023 Place: approaching Saint-Marcel, Aveyron Département, Region of Occitanie, France Maps!

Apparently cows in France moo with a French accent. This tracks. On our 2016 Camino, Francine and I discovered that French sheep say “beh” rather than “baa”, so of course French cows “meuuh” rather than “moo”. Not sure about the shoes, though… Date: 27 August 2023 Place: between Sénergues and Saint-Marcel, Aveyron Département, Region of Occitanie, France Maps!

At the top of the hill, the Camino flattened out. Well, mostly. There was still some undulating and the occasional hill, but mostly it was like this: gentle paths and roads through farmland and meadow. I made good time in this stretch, just cruising along. Initially, the mist was thick on the ground, but it pretty quickly lifted as I […]

The race to Conques for Sunday Mass is a bit of a blur in my memory. The whole way, I just kept saying, “Lord, get me to the church on time!” but the first part of the walk was just hill after hill. There’s a metaphor there somewhere, I suppose. At one point, there were even steps set into the […]

Although there has been a church at this spot since at least the 9th century when we have a charter of Louis the Pious giving it to the Abbey of Conques, the current church was built 500 years later. It was open, and I spent some moments in prayer here before leaving. A sign on the door included the Mass […]

At about 8 AM I heard a Church bell ring out somewhere ahead of me. I soon arrived at the village of Sénergues, with its tall church steeple and castle tower. This was my only plausible stop of the morning. My visit turned out to be very brief indeed, for reasons I’ll talk about tomorrow. Even my brief walk-through of […]