Jumièges and Saint-Wandrille: One of France's Most Admirable Ruins and the Monks of Fontenelle

Required Activities

• Stand in front of the west front of Notre-Dame at Jumièges and work out what a Westwerk is: a Carolingian arrangement kept on into Romanesque building, very rare in France and common in Germany, here framed by two towers 46 m high that go polygonal and step back at the top. Then find the western tribune behind it, above where the porch church stood

• Sit through a sung office at Saint-Wandrille, a Benedictine house of the Solesmes congregation that has been on the right bank here since Wandrille founded Fontenelle in 649, and count how many of the monks are in the choir — this is a working community, not a museum, and the offices are its day

• Cross the Seine free of charge on the Heurteauville ferry and back, and from mid-river work out which way the loop of the river runs — Jumièges sits inside a meander so tight that the abbey towers show first on one bow and then the other

• In the roofless nave at Jumièges, look up at where the lead came off: church and cloister were both stripped, along with the tin, the copper, the stores and the whole of a library that had held more than ten thousand volumes. Catherine de Médicis and the boy king Charles IX came to see the damage for themselves on 28 July 1563

• Walk east from the Romanesque nave at Jumièges into the Gothic choir of about 1275 and find the join, then set what you have seen against Saint-Wandrille downstream, where the same order kept going: two houses of the same river, one stopped in 1563 and one still singing