Last month I spent a wonderful week in the Loire Valley on a writing retreat with six of my writer friends. We rented a huge gite – complete with two swimming pools! In the midst of vineyards. As well as lots of writing and writerly talk (plus a few hilarious writerly games) we visited three chateaus – although I only managed two of them. The photo above was taken of us all on our last evening there. From left to right – Alison Morton, Carol Cooper, Jean Gill, Jane Davis, Karen Inglis, me and Lorna Fergusson.

I decided to travel by car using the overnight ferry and was delighted to have Lorna as a passenger. We landed at Dieppe at 6am and weren’t expected at the gite until 5pm so we took a leisurely route avoiding the péages. We stopped off for lunch in one of my favourite places, Chartres. I’ve visited the cathedral there many times but was keen to go back given my new-found passion for stained glass as a result of writing the Hearts of Glass trilogy.

Chartres did not disappoint. The glass there is nothing short of spectacular. The largest collection of stained glass in the world, most of it from the thirteenth century it is an inspiration, flooding the vast space with colour. It’s believed that around a dozen artists were involved in the creation of the 13^th century windows – completed between 1205 and 1225 – not long after work began on the construction of the building in 1194.  The windows are like the most perfect jewels – rich and vibrant with colour and life even after nine hundred years. When the cathedral was built the windows had a didactic rather than a solely decorative purpose. Featuring a myriad of different Bible stories they were used to educate the often-illiterate congregation. There are stories of the saints and martyrs, Bible stories, parables, stories of prophets and the apostles.  But most of all, the sheer beauty and magnificence of the work must have inspired men and women of the Middle Ages to have an unshakeable belief in a divine power.

When I last visited about seven or eight years ago, I was outraged by the way the French architectural authorities were tarting up the interior of the cathedral in an effort to make it look as it might have done when first built. Not the glass but the stone masonry. They were taking it back to a false brand-new pristine state, thereby eradicating the patina of centuries – the dark deposits of candle smoke that had accumulated over nine centuries. And they were doing this by painting it! The result made the place look like a wedding cake. This time, more having been completed in the interim, there was less untreated stone to mark the contrast, so I wasn’t quite so upset by it. But when I approached one area close up, I saw where they had painted over the stone they had actually painted on lines to mimic the mortar between the blocks of masonry! See the image below. This strikes me as crass.

The close-up!

But despite this travesty, nothing can detract from the sheer magnificence of the space, the beauty of the intricate stone carvings and those glorious stained-glass windows.