Candes-Saint-Martin: Where Saint Martin Died, at the Meeting of the Vienne and the Loire

Required Activities

• Work round the collegiate church and find the chapel said to stand where Martin died, then look hard at the carving the church is famous for — specialists are still arguing about which parts belong to which campaign, so pick out for yourself where the stonework changes hand

• Walk out to the bec de Vienne and find the line where the two rivers refuse to mix — the Vienne's water, two hundred cubic metres a second against the Loire's four hundred and fifty, holds to the south bank as a separate channel for some way downstream, pushed over by the Loire's steeper fall

• Climb the chemin du Tire-Jarret — the hamstring-puller — to the top of the coteau, a slope averaging fifteen per cent above the village, and from the plateau edge pick out the confluence, the Véron point opposite and the roofs of the village stepped down the terraces below you

• Read the village by height: boatmen's houses between the route de Compostelle and the river, the canons' and notables' houses on the first terraces around the collegiate church, and the vine-growers at the top — and collect the four street names left over from the river trade, du Bac, des Mariniers, des Pêcheurs and du Port

• Find the houses that are wholly or partly cut into the hillside the village quarried itself out of, and learn to tell its two stones apart on the walls: the very fine, soft white tuffeau that crumbles at the edges, and the coarser yellow tuffeau that has held

• Walk south to the Borne des Trois-Évêchés, where Candes, Montsoreau and Fontevraud still meet and where the dioceses of Tours, Angers and Poitiers once did — the boundary of three Gaulish peoples before that. The stone that marked it is long gone, so find the point from the commune boundaries on the ground