Back Down the Lot

On Tuesday, 27 May we turned in the increasing current and began our descent of the Lot. We had come to the final narrow buoyed channel below the weir at Saint-Vite, seventy-five kilometres up the river from la Garonne. The lock at the weir has not yet been restored and this is the end of navigation on the lower Lot.

It was still heavily overcast, cool and threatening to rain as we retraced our way down through Écluse les Ondes and Lustrac. We were once again in down locks, so the process was simpler. There having been no traffic since our ascent, the locks were in our favour and we didn’t have to stop to drop Edi off on the quai before the locks. 

The air was still and offered wonderful reflections of the passing scene, here Château Rogé midway between St-Sylvestre and Villeneuve-sur-Lot.

A short distance downstream of Rogé we were challenged by a swan. 

As we approached, it swam across toward us with raised wings and lowered head and then turned parallel to our track and beat the water.

It then turned and did the same in the opposite direction, moving quickly astern of us.

We thought it had quit, buy shortly it began a low level kamikaze run toward our stern, veering at the last moment, just as I was ducking. 

Edi shot a beautiful photo of it slowing to veer off.

It did another challenging run, this time making foot stomps in the water on its approach.

Just to make sure, it did a similar run down our other side.

Satisfied that he had scared us off, he headed back up river while we continued down. We shortly came to the waiting wharf for Écluse Villeneuve and secured to wait for the chamber to fill.

In the embankment above the wharf is a planting of wild flowers, including roses

and poppies

and some pretty yellow blossoms. We didn’t need to be reminded to take the time to smell the roses.

Within twenty minutes we had cycled down the thirteen metre lock and were heading out to continue down the river.

By the time we reached Villeneuve-sur-Lot, the clouds had cleared to the southwest and it looked like we might have a rare sunny afternoon. We hadn’t felt good with stopping on our way upriver and we thought we would give it another look on our way back down. As we passed under the old bridge, we still felt uneasy about the place. The stories of rocks thrown at visiting barges and of mooring lines being cut certainly influenced our thinking, but in the end, it was our gut feeling that told us to continue on past.

As we passed through the gap in the weir at the old lock, the current in the river seemed a bit quicker than it had been on our ascent.

We arrived in St-Sylvestre at 1225, just five minutes before most of the supermarkets, grocery stores, butchers and bakeries close for lunch throughout France. We stopped anyway, just to check incase this town had some liberated shopkeepers that allow reason to defy tradition. It doesn’t, so after watching all the hoardings come down and shutters close, we continued downriver. Along the way we passed the thirteenth century Château Favols.

At 1540 we secured to one of the two fifteen-metre wooden wharves in Casseneuil. The €5 moorage includes water and electricity.

The moorage is at the junction of la Lède, a tributary to the Lot. We strolled along the track that follows la Lède past the bases of ancient fortification walls. Among its early history, the town was a Roman settlement called Cassinogilum, from which it derives its present name. Because of its strategic location, the town was a frequent target, having been sacked and partly destroyed by the Normans in 848 and repeatedly during the Cathar crusades, the Hundred Years War and the Wars of Religion. The walls look a patchwork of frequent repairs.

In the town are many medieval buildings along the narrow, winding streets and hanging over the banks of la Lède. 

Église Saint-Pierre was destroyed in 1214 and was soon rebuilt as église Saint-Pierre et Saint-Paul, which still stands. It is reputed for its fine fifteenth and sixteenth century frescoes; however, the church was not open when we were there, so we didn’t see them. 

At 1015 on Wednesday morning we slipped and continued downstream. Along the banks we saw many pigeonniers, some restored and others converted to feature towers on homes.

We descended the ten metre lock above Castelmoron…

… and swept past the town on the rising current as rain came and went in frequent showers.

We continue to be amazed by the French fashion of shutting everything down for lunch. They even close the river to waterskiing at noon. We saw many signs along the river marking the start and end of watersport zones and giving the hours: 10H to 12H30 and 16H to 20H. Why they need to shut down waterskiing and fast motorboating for lunch makes as much sense to us as does shutting down nearly the entire country for a lunch break.

We motored past Clairac and into the narrow canal bypassing its weir.

The ‘lock-from-hell’ at the mill in Clairac was easier on the descent, but it still spoke loudly of having been designed by someone with absolutely no knowledge of boating.

At 1448 we secured to the dilapidated wooden wharf above Écluse Aiguillon. After we had settled-in, I phoned the listed number to arrange for lock keepers and pilot to lower us to la Garonne, guide us up the river and lift us into la Baïse on Thursday morning. The person who answered the phone said: “C’est impossible, demain est un jour férié”, Eet ees impossabeel, tomorreau ees a oliday”. I further learned that it is the day when everyone in France is supposed to sit around assuming that Mary is in heaven. We quickly changed plans and organized the Lot-Garonne-Baïse transit for Friday.

With everything closed on Thursday, and many others closed on Friday to ‘make the bridge’ to the weekend and the some continuing the closure through the weekend to keep the momentum going, we scrambled to restock our fresh provisions. We walked across Pont Napoleon and through town to the Intermarché, returning in a heavy rain that increased to a downpour by the time we made it back to Zonder Zorg. Fortunately, the free moorage includes water and electricity, so we took long hot showers and enjoyed the dry cabin warmed by our electrical heater as the level and current of the river slowly rose.

On Thursday everything was closed as we walked through the town between rain showers. It was Edi’s birthday and we thought it nice for all of France to take the day off to celebrate with her. We added to the festivities at dinner with a bottle of Champagne Veuve Clicquot, a birthday gift from elder daughter, Amy.

Further Up the Lot

On Thursday 22 May we had secured on the floats in St-Sylvestre, fifty-nine kilometres up le Lot from la Garonne. L’éclusier at the last lock had told us that the next lock, nine kilometres upstream of St-Sylvestre was closed until Monday, so if we wanted to see the remainder of the navigable river, we had a four-day wait. About a hundred metres up the slope from the moorage is an Intermarché, just before it is a fuel station with diesel and a large selection of gaz tanks and across the street is a hardware store. An artisan bakery is half a block away and on a hilltop across the river is a medieval town to explore.

On the mooring floats are pylons with both water and electrical hook-ups, but they were deactivated. Across the river in Port de Penne is a marina, which according to the guide is managed by Babou Marine of Cahors. From our mooring it looked full, so we walked across the bridge to see if there was any space. The mooring spaces were all filled with small runabouts and a float home. On the door of la Capitainerie was a sign indicating it was closed except for a few hours on Saturdays and Sundays. There was water and electricity at the pylons.

Friday continued our long spell of rain showers. In the early evening a series of thunderstorms rolled through and during one of them, as I was cooking dinner, our propane tank ran out. I got drenched changing to the spare, but we were rewarded by a small crack in the clouds that generated a double rainbow.

Late morning on Saturday we walked across to la Capitainerie to find out about getting some water. Le Capitain told us he would have the technician from the town come to our float to turn on the system and to collect the mooring fees for our stop. We told him we were heading up the hill to look at Penne d’Agenais and would be back aboard Zonder Zorg to meet him at 1500. We started the two-kilometre climb to the medieval ridge-top town.

After a rather bland beginning to the town, we came to the lower gate, Porte de la Ville leading into the old quarter.

We wandered the narrow streets that wound their way up the steep hillside. Leading off these are many very narrow lanes, many with steps to make the climb easier.

Although the town dates to the early thirteenth century, the buildings appear to be mostly seventeenth and eighteenth century and they are finely restored and maintained.

We continued to climb and wind our way up toward the top of the ridge past well cared for homes.

At the top we came the upper gate, Porte Ferracap, which looks both northward down over the river and southward down into the town. The view from the outside shows it to have been well fortified. 

We passed back in through the gate and continued up the hill; we were heading to the silver-domed Sanctuary we had seen from the river.

We arrived at the summit to find a comical hodgepodge of Romanesque, Byzantine and Belle Epoque architecture that seems a failed attempt to combine too many styles. Fortunately its exterior is difficult to view because of the surrounding trees and the steep drop-off on three sides. The fourth side, backs into rocky cliffs of a higher knoll to the east.

Construction on la Sanctuare Notre-Dame de Peyragude was begun in 1897 and according to the plaque inside, it was terminated in 1948. Whether the termination was upon completion is hard to determine. Also on the inside we learned that on this site sometime around the year 1000 a small chapel was built and it became a stop on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. The current Sanctuary is built on the ruins of a series of chapels destroyed during Hundred Years War, the War of Religion and the aftermath of the French Revolution. 

We followed a sign indicating ruins. The mud path led us last a cave entrance, so we went in for a look. We saw large rooms with three entrances, and there are likely more, but the place was unlit except from the entrances and we hadn’t brought our spelunking gear. There is no signage nor information available, but we later learned these had been occupied during Paleolithic times.

We followed the path as it wound up to the summit of the knoll, where across a short lawn we saw some ruins identified only as royal. The remaining walls were very thick, indicating a large or strongly fortified structure once grew from them.

We climbed onto the south wall and scrambled along a sloping broken top to its apex at the corner with the west wall. We were looking down on roofs of the Sanctuary from which perspective it looked more Byzantine than anything. Below it in the distance we could see Zonder Zorg on the river.

We climbed down from our exposed perch and followed a mud path that led back to the Sanctuary. Buried in a photocopied sheet about the Sanctuary was mention of the problem of the former chapels being frequently destroyed because they were so close to the castle built in 1182 by le Duc de Gascogne. A century and a half later, during the Hundred Years War, Penne was a frequent battleground as the English lost and regained the strategically positioned castle four times, each time the battles causing serious damage to the town and the chapel. As we walked back down the hill we ran our English history through our minds. The Duke of Gascony at the time the castle was built was Richard the Lionheart, the future King Richard I of England. His mother was Eleanor of Aquitaine and his father Henry Plantagenet, England’s King Henry II. That this information is obscured and the castle ruins are nearly unmarked, amazes us. We later refreshed our knowledge that Richard was also Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine, Count of Poitiers, Count of Anjou, Count of Maine, Count of Nantes, and Overlord of Brittany, thus having a control of a large portion of northern and western France. Yet he is almost ignored here by the French.

We were back down aboard Zonder Zorg by 1430, well in advance of the time when the technician was to come to switch on the water and electricity on the float. We waited aboard through the remainder of the afternoon and into the evening. We waited Sunday morning, then we walked across to la Capitainerie to find out what was happening, but found nobody there. I tested the water spigot to ensure there was water, walked back over and motored Zonder Zorg to a temporary mooring with her nose under the low bridge end and her beam poised on a corner of the stone wharf. We filled our water tanks, found a rate schedule, but could not find anyone around to take our payment. We slipped and continued up river.

Four kilometres along we passed an old decommissioned lock, the top of which was just awash. The bollards and old iron hardware of the gates were still in place. The river was removed from the list of navigable waterways in 1926, so the last maintenance on this lock would have been more than eighty-eight years ago.

A further five kilometres brought us to Écluse Lustrac, which was closed until Monday morning. Shortly after 1600 we secured to the waiting float just downstream of the entrance to the lock. 

It is a very pretty setting, and we were delighted to see that the old mill buildings had been converted into residences. We walked up to the lock to see if there was any indication why the lock had been closed for four days, but could see no signs of work, recent, present or future. 

It rained heavily Sunday evening and overnight and it continued heavily on Monday, so we decided to remain on the float until the forecast clearing on Tuesday. 

On Tuesday morning our card worked in the control slot and the lock prepared itself for us.

As we left the lock we found a fresh current in the river from the rains. 

We continued along for three kilometres to Écluse Ondes, the last lock on the navigable section of the lower Lot.

Two kilometres beyond the lock begins a 1.5 kilometre buoyed channel which was cut through solid rock in 2010 to the Saint-Vite weir, the current end of navigation. The guide says: “Do not move away from the centre as the rocks are sharp. On arriving at Saint-Vite, beware of the cross currents generated by the weir.” I looked at the narrow buoyed channel winding up the river then out of sight around the bend; it appeared to be narrower than Zonder Zorg’s length. With the current and the unknown eddies at the weir, turning around any further upstream would be risky. My mariner’s prudence caused us to forgo the final fifteen hundred metres of the navigation. We turned and started back down.