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This is the main church of Royal Abbey of l’Épau and it’s an impressive space and relatively complete example of Cistercian architecture. The abbey was partly destroyed in 1365 during the Hundred Years’ War, reportedly by the inhabitants of Le Mans to prevent it being used as a base by English forces, and reconstruction continued from the late fourteenth century into the fifteenth century. Modern study of the surviving roof timbers has dated work above the choir to 1427–28, the crossing to 1428–29, the north transept to 1429–30 and the nave to 1431–32.

There weren’t many visitors, so I had this space to myself for most of my visit. Cistercian churches were intended to avoid excessive decoration and visual distraction, but they did allow themselves a little decadence with wall paintings.

I was initially puzzled by the plan of the church, although it doesn’t take a great deal to confuse me. The large open space in the first photographs is labelled on some plans as the transept, while the nave above appears unexpectedly short. The church has the usual cross-shaped Cistercian plan, with an east-to-west length of around 70 metres and a transept measuring approximately 47 metres across, but descriptions of the building note that the nave was never fully completed. That would explain why the transept seems to dominate the interior and why the nave looks as though somebody reached the western end of the building programme and thought “that’ll probably do” or similar. Or perhaps someone fell out with the construction engineers, or, more likely, they ran out of money.

This was what the church looked like in 1940, taken from a similar angle from where I took the previous photo. The building had been used by troops in the First and Second World Wars, but it had been on the decline since the late eighteenth century when the monks were thrown out.

And further usage of the church when it was used as a large shed, I suppose it meant that the farmer’s cart remained nice and dry. Fortunately for the farmer, this was a well-built church with no danger of falling down.

I think it’s fair to say that Nantes doesn’t have a Reform led council, but let’s not digress….. I thought I’d better explain what I was trying to achieve in France last week beyond walking around in excessive heat and photographing municipal art.

The basic plan was, as ever, reassuringly simple. I had booked a cheap Ryanair flight to Nantes for Monday and needed to be back in Norwich by Friday for London Craft Beer Festival, which was an important professional and cultural commitment I was not intending on missing. Ideally, I wanted to return on Thursday, giving me enough time to be ready for the event in London that started on Friday morning.

My preferred option was a £9 Wizz Air flight using my Wizz Multipass, although availability is only revealed three days before departure. This adds a pleasing element of suspense to travel planning, rather like waiting for lottery results except that the prize is Luton Airport. When the flights appeared, the nearest suitable departure was not from Nantes or anywhere that could reasonably be described as nearby. It was from Lyon, on the other side of France, introducing the relatively minor logistical challenge of crossing a substantial portion of the country to take advantage of a £9 airfare.

I first checked the direct trains from Nantes to Lyon and discovered that French railways were apparently under the impression that I wished to purchase part of the train rather than merely sit on it. The fares were considerably higher than I had expected, threatening to undermine the entire financial achievement of the £9 flight. To show the challenge I faced, the train journeys were showing at around £300 and I wasn’t paying that.

Fortunately, continued research eventually revealed a cheaper train from Nantes to Le Mans. By “continued research”, I mean approximately three hours of opening tabs, rejecting fares and moving imaginary passengers around France like pieces on a railway-themed board game. Le Mans did not get me especially close to Lyon in any immediate geographical sense, but the ticket was affordable and the journey allowed me to spend a night in another city, which I naturally regarded as an advantage rather than an additional complication.

The resulting itinerary involved flying to Nantes, travelling to Le Mans, spending the night there, continuing across France to Lyon and then flying back to Britain for £9. To some people this might appear unnecessarily elaborate, but those people do not understand the quiet satisfaction of assembling a journey from a collection of individually cheap components. Other people have high powered jobs and families to manage, I have to work out how to get home without spending £300 on a train. Well, we all have our burdens I suppose.

So, what could possibly go wrong with this new competitive sport I’ve started playing of cheap and complex travel?

I was only staying in Nantes for one night as I had to get to Lyon, more on which in the next post actually, and I decided to have a walk around the city taking in the Mechanical Elephant. It meant around an hour of walking, but I had plenty of stops given the extreme heat in Nantes, although it was fortunately a little cooler than the previous day. This also meant that I could walk for several minutes at a time before needing to stand in the shade and reconsider every decision that had brought me to western France in July.

Anyway, the photo above is ‘Éloge du pas de côté’, or ‘In Praise of the Sidestep’, a bronze sculpture by Philippe Ramette in Place du Bouffay. Created for Le Voyage à Nantes in 2018, it shows a suited man stepping beyond the edge of his pedestal, celebrating the idea of looking at the world differently rather than obediently remaining where public monuments are usually expected to stand.

I thought I’d take a photo of a Nantes tram as, well, this is the sort of riveting content on which I thrive. There I stand, phone in hand, and a man decides to walk over, stop and read his newspaper. I decided this felt like a traditional French scene, so there we go.

This is Feydball, a permanent public artwork created for Le Voyage à Nantes in 2015, combining a deliberately uneven, crescent-shaped football pitch with a large warped mirror. The reflective surface makes the distorted pitch and goalposts appear reassuringly normal while bending the players and ball out of shape instead, which is perhaps contemporary art’s most accurate contribution to amateur football. The site retains its natural slope and irregularities, so anyone attempting a serious match must contend with geometry, gravity and the possibility that the mirror is making them look considerably more athletic than they really are. This might encourage me to play more five-a-side to be fair if it made me look athletic as there’s only so much that bar billiards can do for my sporting physique.

This monument in Place de la Bourse commemorates Colonel Georges de Villebois-Mareuil, a Nantes-born French officer who volunteered to fight alongside the Boer republics against the British during the Second Boer War and was killed in South Africa in 1900. The bronze sculpture, created by Raoul Verlet and unveiled in 1902, shows the dying officer supported by an allegorical figure of France, complete with flag and enough heroic drama to remove any possibility that he had merely sat down for a rest. I assumed that they no longer held any ill-feeling towards the British over the arrangement.

And safely at the railway station with just 53 minutes to spare before my train as I like plenty of time to find my platform. This transpired to involve 18 minutes of staying in front of a giant fan, 14 minutes finding Carrefour to get a drink and 1 minute finding the platform before boarding the train early.

I’ve already uploaded a video of the Grand Éléphant, or Mechanical Elephant, to surprise and delight my myriad of two blog readers.

The Grand Éléphant is the most famous creation at Les Machines de l’Île, an artistic project developed on the former Nantes shipyards and inspired by the city’s industrial history, together with the imaginative worlds associated with Jules Verne. Inaugurated in 2007, the elephant is 12 metres high, 21 metres long and weighs 48.4 tonnes, so it’s not the most subtle of set-ups. Built from steel and wood, it moves through the old docklands at a stately one to three kilometres per hour, which is not especially rapid but is still quicker than some municipal regeneration schemes. There’s a staff member that walks with it to ensure that no pedestrians get flattened and there’s also a driver inside steering the arrangement.

Up to 50 passengers can climb aboard for a journey lasting around 30 minutes, with balconies and an upper terrace providing views across the former shipyards. Its legs, ears, eyes and trunk move through a combination of hydraulic, pneumatic and gas-powered cylinders, while the trunk can spray water over people standing nearby although I didn’t get too close to that. This is described as part of the entertainment, although it does perhaps introduce a useful element of jeopardy and uncertainty for anyone with expensive camera equipment. On this occasion though there was considerable restraint and no moment of collective panic. From the ground, the whole machine looks remarkably convincing to some degree, although obviously some imagination is required.

What makes the elephant particularly effective is that it is not confined inside a conventional attraction but walks through the public landscape of the Île de Nantes, turning the former industrial site into a piece of moving theatre. I hadn’t realised how close I would be able to get to it and there were plenty of people watching. It’s a bit expensive to actually take a ride on the elephant and exciting as that might have been, I thought it was just as satisfying watching for free nearby.

The only slight disappointment was that nobody was soaked by the elephant while I was watching, as this would have provided some additional material for the blog. The water spraying was really quite restrained, perhaps because of previous complaints or because the operators had correctly assessed the mood of the crowd. I had been hoping for at least one unsuspecting tourist to receive the full experience, entirely for documentary purposes, but the elephant behaved with impeccable moderation. It was still a spectacular and wonderfully eccentric creation, even if it declined to provide the minor public incident I had been waiting for.

More about this in the next riveting post, but, for now, here’s a little video below.