Auzelou and the Côte de Naves

The Boulevard Auzelou begins where the descent through Tulle stops being a descent. The Corrèze runs on the right; the Stade Alexandre-Cueille sits on the left; the road, which has been falling for the better part of an hour, levels for the stadium and turns its attention to going north. The stadium was inaugurated on the eighteenth of August 1929 and would later take its present name in tribute to the secretary general of the Sporting Club Tulliste who would die in May 1940 in a German bombing of the town. It is rugby country here. Two and a half centuries of arms-making at Souilhac and a hundred and seven years of accordion manufacture at the centre of town have not made Tulle a cycling place; the morning shifts went into the factories, and the Saturdays went, and still go, to the fifteen. The Tour has visited the town before, on Bastille Day 1996 and as a stage start in 1976, but it has not previously rolled past the door of the Cueille on its way out. Boulevard Auzelou northbound is a road the race has not used.

It is, however, a road another race has used recently. On the fourth and fifth of April, ninety-eight days before Stage 9 will pass through, the cyclosportive L'Agglomérée, organised by the Tulle Cyclisme Compétition club, departed from the same Boulevard Auzelou with eighteen hundred amateur riders and three hundred and fifty volunteers. The Sunday route shared forty kilometres with the actual Stage 9 road, the Suc au May climb included. The organisers had pitched the whole weekend, in the regional press, as the dress rehearsal at a hundred days out, which is the kind of round number a press release is allowed and a calendar is not. The amateurs went up the road first. The professionals are coming in July. What the cyclosportive's Sunday morning produced, in the local paper's gallery, were photographs of the front of the field at the foot of the climb our riders are about to ride; what it left behind on the boulevard, by the time our segment opens, were the barriers half-down and the bakery on Avenue Victor-Hugo selling its leftover sportif rolls at half-price.

The road climbs from the boulevard in earnest within the first kilometre. The Côte de Naves, two and eight tenths of a kilometre at six point three per cent by the project's own profile, is the day's first categorised climb and the road's exit from the river valley. Tulle north sits at something over two hundred metres; the village of Naves, four kilometres up the road and one ridge higher, sits at three hundred and twenty; the surrounding farms are higher again. The climb takes the road up onto the granite plateau the route will hold until it descends to Ussel six hours of riding from now. The country at this elevation is what the granite supports: the bocage hedgerows holding their cattle, the small straight-walled granite barns standing in for the dressed-limestone byres of the south. Un paysage bocager par excellence, the regional atlases call it: hedgerow-and-pasture country that has kept its shape better than most parts of France because the post-war remembrement passed it lightly¹.

The plateau the climb arrives at holds, off the route to the west, a thing the riders will not see and the helicopters will not show. At the top of the climb, on a low rise within the Naves commune, lies the Gallo-Roman site of Tintignac. It is a fanum sanctuary with a double-cella temple, a hemicycle temple, a temple known locally as the "tribunal", and a small theatre. The site was excavated in the nineteenth century and re-excavated in the modern campaigns under Christophe Maniquet of INRAP², and it would have remained, like a great many provincial Gallo-Roman sites, a matter of regional academic concern, had it not been for what was found in a small pit in September 2004.

The pit, a Gallic ritual deposit, contained roughly five hundred fragments of iron and bronze. Among them, the excavators reassembled seven carnyces: the Iron Age Celtic war trumpet, an upright bronze instrument approximately one and four fifths of a metre tall, the bell shaped as an animal's head and held above the player so the head appeared to bellow over the line of battle. Six of the Tintignac carnyces had boar's heads; the seventh had the head of a serpent-like monster. Polybius, who described a Celtic army at the Battle of Telamon in 225 BC, recorded the sound of the instruments at scale as a thing that unsettled disciplined troops. World archaeology, before Tintignac, had recovered fragments of perhaps five carnyces. Tintignac yielded seven more, including one almost complete. The find, in the technical sense the word will bear, rewrote the corpus.

What had happened in the pit was a deliberate deposition. The instruments, the helmets, the swords and scabbards, the cauldron, the swan-crested helmet: all had been broken before being buried, ritually killed, in the formal language of the discipline. The find passed from the soil to the conservation laboratory of Materia Viva at Toulouse, then to a sequence of international exhibitions opening at Bern, then in April 2022 home to Naves itself, where four of the most spectacular pieces sit in dedicated cases in a small heritage building on the Place de l'Église. A Scottish musician, John Kenny, had begun playing reconstructed carnyces in 1993, in something close to the silence the instrument had kept for two thousand years; the instrument has since been heard at the Stade de France, in the opening battle scene of Gladiator, and on the Pixar soundtrack of Brave. None of which a rider on the climb will know, or need to.

The road, having taken its riders out of the river valley and onto the plateau, levels and turns north-west toward Naves. The wind, on the higher ground, is from somewhere west of south. The kilometre marker shows seventy-seven and a half; the next village and the next climb belong to the segment ahead. Behind, lower and already out of sight, the rugby ground sits beside the river it has sat beside for almost a century, and the boulevard the amateurs of the cyclosportive left from in April runs back the way it came. Somewhere west, on its low rise inside the Naves commune, the small Gallic pit has been empty for a very long time.

Sources

• Stade Alexandre-Cueille (inauguration 18 August 1929; Boulevard de l'Auzelou; Sporting Club Tulliste rugby; tribute to Cueille, victim of the bombing of 11 May 1940): Stade Alexandre-Cueille (Wikipédia).
• Tour de France previous Tulle visits — 1976 Stage 20 start to Puy-de-Dôme (won by Joop Zoetemelk; Lucien Van Impe finished 12 seconds back and went on to win the overall Tour) and 1996 Stage 14 Bastille Day finish from Besse-en-Chandesse (Abdoujaparov sprint, Bjarne Riis in yellow): TV broadcast archives on YouTube — 1976 Stage 20; 1996 Stage 14.
• L'Agglomérée 2026 (4-5 April, departure Boulevard Auzelou, eighteen hundred riders, three hundred and fifty volunteers, Sunday route sharing 40 km of Stage 9 including Suc au May, organised by Tulle Cyclisme Compétition): L'Agglomérée revient les 4-5 avril 2026 (Tulle Agglo); Retour en images sur la 4e édition de l'Agglomérée de Tulle Agglo (La Montagne).
• Limousin granitic basement and the Variscan / Carboniferous emplacement: Géologie du Limousin (Wikipédia).
• Tintignac archaeological site (fanum and temples; modern excavations under Maniquet; September 2004 ritual pit; ~500 fragments; seven carnyces; April 2022 return of four pieces to Naves): Site archéologique de Tintignac (Wikipédia); Tintignac (Wikipedia, EN); Les Arènes de Tintignac, fouille 2004 (INRAP).
• Carnyx instrument (~1.8 m bronze, six boar-headed and one serpent-headed at Tintignac; Polybius on the Battle of Telamon, 225 BC; John Kenny 1993 reconstruction; Stade de France performance 2003; Gladiator opening battle 2000; Brave 2012): Carnyx (Wikipedia).
• Pâtisserie Rochais on Avenue Victor-Hugo (Tulle bakery referenced in the narrative; family business at 9 Avenue Victor-Hugo, Tulle, since 1983): Office de Tourisme de Tulle en Corrèze listing; Eatbu page.
• Bocage limousin and the post-1950 national hedgerow loss (70 % lost since 1950 nationally; Limousin density 60 m/ha regionally and 31 m/ha in Corrèze; phrase paysage bocager par excellence): La haie, levier de la planification écologique (Ministère de l'Agriculture / CGAAER, April 2023); Quel avenir pour le bocage en Limousin? — Hippolyte, Bossis & Burel, ONCFS / Rennes I, July 2008.

Pair-written by Justin Simpson and Claude Opus 4.7. Voice register: tls-essay (scholarly sub-mode) (registers-framework).