Gold Medal

I should have listened more in Year 10 when Miss Russell, our English teacher gave her lesson on comparatives and superlatives. Good, better, best.

I always thought that, like in the Olympics, Gold meant the best in the world, Silver the second best, Bronze the third best, and the rest also ran. But I was once invited out to dinner by someone I wanted to impress, so bought along a bottle of wine awarded a Bronze Medal at the Royal Melbourne Show.  I thought that the Gold or Silver medals might show me as being too eager, and third best was just right. But she explained that a Gold Medal meant that the judges had awarded it 18.5 – 20 points, a Silver that it was awarded 17 – 18.4, and a Bronze was considered just all right with 15.5 – 16.9. So in one year there might be 125 wines awarded Gold Medals at the show.

I always thought that "New York Times Best Seller" meant that a book was top of the best-selling list in the NYT.  But it just means that it was somewhere on the list of the 20 best-selling books for a week or so.

So when Rocamadour is described in advertising brochures in terms of “Most Visited Historic Site” in France, we should have been a bit more openminded.

Yesterday we decided to go on nice walk that started at L’Hospitalet above Rocamadour, wound 16.6 km through the forest, down along the Alzou Gorge, and into sacred site, and then back up to the car.  The walk through the oak and chestnut forests was a delight. The trees had beautiful Autumn shades of red and orange which gave a coloured soft carpet to walk along. We were following a route in the Cicerone Guide Book “Walking the Dordogne”.  The route mostly followed old mule and cart tracks between mossy stone walls.  Along the Alzou Gorge were the remains of half a dozen old water-driven mills. Some of these were really substantial structures. We ate our packed lunch beside the remains of the Moulin de Tournefuille, which ceased operation in 1933. Amazingly the stream that provided the water for the mills was completely dry, which may have been a cause of the abandoning of the mills according to one gulde book.  Limestone country is notorious for streams suddenly disappearing underground.

Rocamadour was one of the greatest pilgrimage destinations of the 12^th and 13^th Centuries.  It was famed for its statue of the Black Virgin, a dark carved wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, believed to perform miracles when prayed to. Kings and Queens of France made the pilgrimage to the Black Virgin, and crowds of up to 30,000 are reported to be there on special Saint’s days. The churches of Rocamadour, and the town itself became very wealthy.  Of course this lead to a number of conquests and lootings.  During the religious wars it was repeatedly taken and retaken by opposing sides.  During the French Revolution when the Church was seen as siding with the Monarchy it was trashed again.  By the middle of the 19^th Century the town and churches were almost deserted.  But by the end of the 19^th Century the Church once again became interested in Rocamadour, and the new railway line started bring in tourists, and the town and Church’s fortunes picked up.

The setting of the upper town and churches certainly is spectacular, with everythig clinging to a high near-vertical cliff like swallows nests on a cave wall.

The Chapel de Notre Dame with the Black Madonna is truly beautiful, but so are a lot of other churches in France.  To me a lot of the buildings were fine examples of 19^th Century restoration. The whole of the upper town and approaches to the churches were non-stop gourmet shops and trinket tourism. Perhaps this is what pilgrimage sites always have been like.

But looking at the day as a whole, giving points for interest, scenery, variety, historic association and pure enjoyment, we all decided that the yesterday was worth a Gold Medal.

Chris