Lestards: The Only Thatched Church in France

The climb that began at the Vézère does not end at the river's edge, as the previous essay was at some pains to say; it goes on lifting the road out of Treignac, up through the last of the gorge's trees, until somewhere above kilometre one hundred and thirty the ground stops climbing and the country changes its mind. This is the crest the last segment handed forward, and it is worth a pause, not because the map marks a tidy summit here (the map, on this climb, marks several, and the surveyors and the roadbook compilers may settle among themselves which of them is the true one) but because it is the place where one landscape becomes another. Behind the rider is the gorge of the Vézère, granite-walled and wooded and fast with water. Ahead, as the firs thin and the horizon pulls back, is the open, lifted, sparer country of the Plateau de Millevaches, and the small commune of Lestards, eight hundred metres up and a hundred and seventeen souls strong, sitting astride the door.

I have always held that the smallest places keep the oddest things, and Lestards keeps about the oddest thing on the whole of this route. It is a church, and by the steady testimony of the Office de Tourisme and of more learned authorities besides, it is the only church in France roofed in thatch, and very possibly the only one in Europe. The building under the thatch is old and plain and good: a Romanesque nave of the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, barrel-vaulted, carried on the honest granite the whole upland is built from, with a clocher-mur, a wall belfry, braced by four corner buttresses on its western face. It was inscribed among the monuments historiques in 1998 and classified outright in 2002. But it is the roof that brings the photographers, and the roof has earned them. The thatch is rye straw, paille de seigle, laid in the Limousin manner, which is neither the Dutch manner nor the English: the bundles are tied down to the joists with twisted and knotted cords of straw rather than pinned under metal bars, a craft kept up into our own time by a few masters, Armand Klavun among the last of them. The Republic thought well enough of the church to put it on a postage stamp in June of 2015. I decline to give a date for the last re-thatching, having found the usual figure unsupported when I went looking for it; thatch is in any case a roof that asks to be renewed rather than dated, and a church that has kept a straw roof over its head on a windy plateau for as long as this one has is best praised for the keeping and not the calendar.

The roof is not, as it happens, the only thing about Lestards made of rye. The village enters the written record in 1315, and around the year 1300, a little before, the canons of the Order of Saint Anthony of Vienne established a commanderie here, a religious house of a very particular vocation: the care of those afflicted with ergotism, the disease the Middle Ages called Saint Anthony's fire, got from bread baked of rye infected with the ergot fungus and productive of gangrene and of hallucination in dreadful combination. The Antonines were the specialists in it, and they did not site their houses at random. They built where the disease was, and the disease was where the rye was, and the rye was here, rye being the grain that consents to grow on a cold acid upland where wheat sulks and fails. So the founding fact of the village is a rye-grain hospital, and the surviving monument of the village is a rye-straw roof, and the line drawn between the two is not a conceit of mine but a plain matter of what the ground will grow. The mission passed by a royal decree of 1766 to the Knights Hospitaller, the Order of Malta, in whose keeping the old Antonine charge ended its days.

What the ground will grow is, in truth, the whole subject of this segment, for Lestards stands on a threshold. The Plateau de Millevaches is the water-tower of this corner of France, the château d'eau from which the Vienne and the Creuse and the Vézère and the Corrèze all rise; its surface is a weave of landes, the open heath of heather and bilberry, and of tourbières, the peat bogs that hold the rain and let it go again slowly, and, laid over both since the middle of the last century, the dark regular ranks of Douglas fir and spruce that the earlier essays watched closing the view. The rider has been climbing toward this all day without quite arriving, and arrives now. It is, to be exact about an inexact thing, a threshold of catchment rather than of watershed: the streams here still run south and west, down the Vézère toward the Dordogne and the Atlantic, as they have done all the way from the Monédières. But the country they run through has changed its character, from the hurrying gorge-cut water of Treignac to the slow held source-country water of the plateau, and the change is felt at the crest as plainly as it is reasoned on the map.

The table changes with the country, as it always does. Below the crest the cooking is that of the bas-Limousin, of cattle and chestnut and the farcidure dumpling; above it the upland markers begin to show on the village ground, the rye flour and rye bread that the Antonine logic would lead one to expect, and the myrtilles, the bilberries the heath gives up in late summer to be folded into a clafoutis. As for the bicycle, the crest is where the climber collects the climb's points, and the climb has two names and one road. The older races called it the Côte de Lestards, after the village; the Tour calls it the Côte de la Croix de Pey, after a granite cross on the old forest track down to Treignac. But Cyril Gautier going over it in the 2017 Tour du Limousin and Marc Hirschi going the other way over it in the 2020 Tour climbed and descended the same hill, and 2026 is the first time a Tour de France has climbed through Lestards rather than dropped through it, the road for once running uphill through the door.

Our own four riders take the door in their usual fashion, a kilometre or two at a sitting, keeping the honest ledger this blog exists to keep. They have been climbing, in their staggered and patient way, since the gorge; now the firs open, the heath begins, and the small church with the straw roof stands where it has long stood, waiting to be passed. The plateau proper, its bogs and its long stubborn history of people choosing to live where living is hard, belongs to the essays that follow. This one only opens the door and gives it a name.

Sources

• Lestards commune, the Église Saint-Martial as the only thatched-roof church in France, the rye-straw Limousin technique, the Saint-Antoine commanderie and its 1766 transfer to the Hospitallers, and the 2015 postage stamp: Lestards, Wikipédia; Église Saint-Martial de Lestards, Office de Tourisme Terres de Corrèze.
• The Plateau de Millevaches as château d'eau, its landes and tourbières, and the twentieth-century afforestation: Plateau de Millevaches, Wikipédia.
• The climb's two names (the Côte de la Croix de Pey as "98% of the Col de Lestards") and its Tour du Limousin and Tour de France passages: Tour du Limousin, Wikipédia; Tour de France Stage 12 preview, The Inner Ring (2020).

Pair-written by Justin Simpson and Claude Opus 4.8. Voice register: saintsbury-modern (registers-framework).