Day 5 – Auchy-au-Bois to Bruay La Buissiere

‘Even though the road may be hard, it leads to the light of God…’ (St Benôit Joseph Labre)

Thursday 5/4/2018

Distance 21km Total from Canterbury 139.8km

After a magnificent breakfast I bade farewell to Madame Brigitte. The first stop was just around the corner at the parish church. It was not open but there was a war grave. Eight young men from a bomber which presumably was shot down in 1943. Something immensly sad though I am not a fan of war.

They were all very young and their details are here

After this I reached very quickly Amettes, a fascinating place. It is the birth place of St Benôit Joseph Labre, patron saint of pilgrims. After a brief walk through fields you come to his birthplace, just below the parish church.

It is beautifully kept and a pleasant surprise to find it open, though unattended. He was born in 1748, the eldest of 15 children. Having failed to gain admission to several austere religious orders he left home at 21 and spent the remainder of his life criss-crossing Europe on foot between holy places including Santiago de Compostela, Rome, Montserrat Loreto and Assisi. He lived on donations spending most of his time in prayer. He died in Rome in Holy Week 1783. He is patron of pilgrims and the homeless and was canonised in 1881. He is buried in Santa Maria ai Monti in Rome. If I reach there I’ll check it out. There is a wealth of information about his life on notices in the little house including many interesting legends. ‘Benôit had the open road, the lanes, the woods and the company of the poor as his cloister.’

Thereafter, I didn’t follow the Raju book, but made my way instead to the Rue Brunehaut, the very straight road that leads to Bruay. Brunehaut was Queen Brunhilde, who made improvements to the road in the sixth century. She met her death violently by being tied to the tail of a galloping horse when she was 80, but I don’t know why. I walked along the margin of the road, but it was really quite quiet and not a problem. And it was several km shorter than the ‘recommended’ path. I live in a country without many pavements though I come from a country that has a lot. I run nearly every day on roads with no pavement so I am fairly used to keeping an eye out for traffic. I will tell you my address. It is ‘No number, Unnamed road.’ I guess over a million people share that address in the country in which I live. It causes a problem when I am filling in online forms and I often need to invent an address. Portugal is a country not unlike the country in which I live, in many ways, but there every ginnel has a name, which is very useful for map reading. The country in which I live has a name on every roundabout, and a sign on each to give you the name. I do not understand why.

The road to Bruay was pretty straight, through open country. It threatened rain all day, but it never materialised. There was quite a cold wind though. I began to see a lot of roads and lanes named for Roger Salengro, and also a park and a stadium. I had never heard of him, but he was a left wing politician between the wars and was hounded by the fascist press. He committed suicide in 1936 and it is reported that a million attended his funeral.

Soon I was passing through a succession of small towns. This area was formerly a coal mining area. And the mining villages reminded me quite a bit of similar ones around St Helens in Lancashire or in the NE of England. I used Google maps for the last couple of miles and I can tell you that Google has no fear of paths through fields nor of mud. It also led me on a bit of a wild goose chase to a dead-end in a swampy field. What had been a footpath had been renovated some distance to the right as a cycle path. I had to negotiate a steep ridge to get down to this, and was very glad of my hiking poles for added stability. But Google did lead me to the door of my hotel. It was a gentle 21km for the day. In fact it was 20.96, but I walked around the car park a few times to get up to 21. If you see someone doing this, you can be pretty sure they are a runner. We like to finish on a round number.

The hotel was modern and a bit soulless, but clean and comfortable and the owners were friendly. There was an Aldi (blue signage in France) and some fast food joints a few hundred metres up the road. Aldi not the best for pilgrims – it is hard to buy just one or two of anything and they do not supply baskets, just trolleys which could hold 200kg. But I got a few essentials.

Tomorrow will be a long day so I had an early night and slept well.