Our short pilgrimage is almost over. I woke up in the night and thought whatever the women of the day, the saints we have encountered – St Jean, St Hilaire, St Leger, St Pierre, St Michel – will walk beside us. I almost saw them in my mind’s eye.

At Chenay after lunch I fell asleep in the church. When I tried to open the door, I couldn’t. I thought of spending hours there trapped but the door was just jammed. We cycled on into Lusignan, another fine town. On the outskirts is a memorial to thirty-one resistance fighters executed in June 1944 by the SS.

Our route took us to Aulnay. I waited at Paille and had a beer but first I went into the small church. Going up to the altar and touching it, I felt a profound sense of communion and the questions of the priests who had stood there through the centuries. Not that I could ever become a priest. How could I when I am still not convinced of the existence of God let alone the truth of religion, but the pilgrimage continues.

Here at Aulnay is the Eglise Saint Pierre d’Aulnay. For the medieval pilgrims, this was an important stop three days southwest of Poitiers, an hour or two in a car and three days for us on our slow cycle (shared). The central portal was brilliantly lit by modern lights and inside a men’s voice choir was rehearsing Basque and local dialect songs for the evening concert.

We now took a road northeast to Ensigne. Lost in the woods, the church locked but a neighbour pointed us to the key hidden above a lintel of the church. Cool after outside but hopelessly corroded by damp and then into the Romanesque wonder of Melle. Three huge churches: St Hilaire, St Pierre, and St Savinien.

We started our bike ride again at Chez Larte. Unfortunately most French country churches are kept locked but at Le Douhet, next to a sign marking the route, the Church of St Martial is kept open. Here far from the crowds is a forgotten corner of Cognac country. I knelt at the altar and felt a profound happiness. It came suddenly and it seemed from God.

At Fenioux there is a Lanterne des Morts. Here in times past if ever a villager died a light would be lit at the top of the tower. For a village, the church is enormous, Romanesque. We camped at St Jean d’Angely, the camp site full of caravans and camper vans jarring with the yellow stones of the Romanesque church. The town was founded in 817 when Pippin, grandson of Charlemagne, he brought the skull of St. John the Baptist. The skull is gone, lost, rediscovered, and thrown away in the Revolution but in the church I was soothed by a tune playing Mozart’s Requiem Mass.

We arrived in Pons, the start of our pilgrimage following the Route St Jacques de Compostela. Here we found the Hôpital des pèlerins. 1,400 kilometres to Compostela, 475 kilometers to Paris. We were en route.

We arrived at Saintes, following small roads with a picnic at Gallo-Roman ruins at Therac.

At Santes, pilgrims for hundreds of years had stopped to visit the tomb of the first bishop of Saintes, St. Eutrope. His ancient simple tomb is in the crypt, now a few bored tourists wander past – perhaps unaware or disinterested in this plain slab of stone, but centuries ago as monks sang the office in the nave above, here hordes of hungry, bedraggled, dirt poor pilgrims would have filed around the tomb.

Pause, Gabriel, then, for a moment in history, cease the journey forward. Having said that, I got hot and exasperated climbing the hills south of Saintes in searching Fancouvertes, and arrived at the camp site exhausted with putting up the tent.

We were in a small village, Mornac-sur-Seudre overwhelmed by tourists now but atmospheric, set in the middle of a marsh. The old villagers had made their living from collecting salt and hunting for oysters. The font in the church was in the shape of a large oyster shell. Was this in tribute to the trade of the village or acknowledgement of the Route St-Jacques thirty kilometres to the east? The churches here are very simple – no adornment — and many villages have Protestant ‘temples’, no doubt an echo of the days when Cardinal Richelieu laid siege to the Huguenots in La Rochelle.

We spent the day on the very busy French coast. It was incredibly hot and dry, the crowds enormous. Then we headed inland to the Church of St Sulpice near Royan. I caught the Curé as he was locking up and he gave me the history of the dark eyes that had inspired the saint’s life. I had heard he had planted a medieval garden and he showed it to me. In medieval times, every plant, every herb – and there were scores of them – had a purpose rich in folklore and knowledge, every ailment of the mind or body could be cared for. In this quiet place beside the twelfth-century church I knew a peace of mind I had not known even on the edge of the Atlantic Sea, its waves lapping gently against the rocks on the beach.

Later as I lay awake in my tent I realised that there can be no peace of mind in thinking about oneself, one’s problems. No Gabriel, it is not just the unselfish thing to meditate on others, it is the only way to get any peace of mind. The change came quite suddenly to me. One moment I was tossing and turning thinking of some setback or problem, the next I thought of are of my children and their problems and then came an extraordinary peace of mind.