Past Lagleygeolle

In the middle of a Sunday afternoon in July, or an evening in mid-April for our four riders, at the top of a climb that is technically still finishing, the road turns left around a hedge and the forest runs out. This is the summit of Puy Boubou, at four hundred and four metres, a kilometre past the point at which the climb is usually described as over. A rider on a good day would not notice the difference. The difference, on the map, is segment five.

For seven kilometres from here the road descends. Not steeply. A sustained grade of around two per cent, with stretches of four or five, nothing that asks for brakes. The chestnut forest that made the second half of segment four so dark thins within a kilometre and the sky comes back. A little to the west, across an open field, the village of Lagleygeolle sits two hundred metres from the road the Tour is about to take. The Vicomte de Turenne once held the land. A twelfth-century priory stood near where the present church stands now. The village is two hundred and twenty-two inhabitants. The road passes the village to its east and does not stop.

Lagleygeolle is an Occitan name that means "the small church", from la gleisòla; the commune is named for the priory that became the church that became the centre of the village. The name passed into French in a Frenchified spelling that no longer looks Occitan, and into the language of cyclists who will see the commune on the road-book and, if they look left at the right kilometre, the gleisòla itself across the field. The present church, Notre Dame de la Nativité, carries vestiges of the twelfth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries; the bell tower is from 1889. The Tour will cross the commune that contains all of this in a few minutes at racing speed. Lagleygeolle and Meyssac were one commune until 1870, when a long administrative argument finally found its line; the road today crosses that line without noticing.

What the road does meet is a string of hamlets too small for any map a stage-watcher is likely to consult. The names come in order along the descent: Antignac past Lagleygeolle village, Fouilloux halfway down, and then a cluster of them, Cornilloux and Le Planchat and Le Suc and Le Faure, where the road eases toward the Beynat commune line. These are lieux-dits more than villages. A few houses, a farm, a cluster of outbuildings set back from the verge. The Tour will pass dozens of such places on its way to Ussel. Most stages, once they leave the cities, are mostly made of them. A rider on a training day, or a local on a shopping trip from Beynat, registers them the way any country road registers anything: as a change in the hedge, a new roof line, a dog that looks up and then does not bother.

Around kilometre thirty-four, on a stretch that is neither memorable nor forgettable, the road leaves Lagleygeolle for Beynat. The change is invisible. There is no sign, no shift in road surface, no new cast of hedgerow. Beynat village is still more than a kilometre ahead and will not appear in this segment; the chestnut festival there, mentioned in the previous entry, waits another week of writing to arrive.

This is the first stretch of the stage that will feel, in the riding, like a transition rather than an event. The category-three climb is done. The next climb, the Côte de Lagleygeolle, starts two kilometres after segment five ends, and takes its name from the village the road just passed without seeing. The segment between these two climbs is a corridor, not a destination, and a stage is made of both. I find that I do not mind writing about a corridor. A stage with no corridors would be exhausting, and a department with no quiet communes would be smaller than the Corrèze actually is.

The four riders tracking their daily kilometres for this blog will not pass through Lagleygeolle or Beynat. They walk wherever the walking takes them, and the ledger caps their daily distance at two kilometres regardless of where they walked. The commune names do not reach them. Nothing is lost by this. The commune names do not quite reach the pro peloton either; the pro peloton will climb Puy Boubou as a dot on a profile and descend the dot until the next dot. The names on the map belong to the land, not to the race, and most of the time the race is content to borrow the land and give it back.

The descent runs out at kilometre thirty-six, on the Beynat side of an invisible line, short of the village and short of the next climb. The road turns and rises again shortly; it always does. What segment five adds to the accumulation is not a climb or a descent or a village but the small admission that the narrative summit and the actual summit were not the same place, and the smaller observation that most of the kilometres of a long stage pass through land the stage does not see. The Tour crosses more of the Corrèze than it visits, which is part of what stages are for: they are the reason the country gets written about by a blog that would not otherwise have a reason to think about a small-church commune south of Puy Boubou.

Sources

• Lagleygeolle commune history, population, and church: Histoire de Lagleygeolle (charles-de-flahaut.fr), Lagleygeolle (Wikipedia)
• Hamlet names and positions along the route (Antignac, Fouilloux, Cornilloux, Le Planchat, Le Suc, Le Faure), and the Lagleygeolle / Beynat commune boundary: OpenStreetMap, queried via Overpass API within 4 km of Lagleygeolle village centre.