Advent postcards, Bignac Charente

Advent postcards, Bignac, Charente

Advent day three

It’s the first Sunday of Advent, so it seemed fitting for today’s cycling advent-ure postcard to feature a local church. Bignac, in the Charente is about twenty kilometres north of Angoulême and is home to just over three hundred people. We cycled through one Sunday in May, returning from an overnight stay in Angoulême, and it proved a interesting place to stop for a rest and refuel.

 

The first thing to catch my eye was the metal sculpture that looked a little like a multi-headed Loch Ness monster emerging from a patch of grass. It’s a piece called “Le Racinosaure” (the root monster) by metalwork artist Franck Mercky and has stood proudly in the village since the Sarabandes festival was held in Bignac in 2015. It is traditional for all villages that have hosted this fun art event to keep a festival “root” as proof of their involvement and this smiley monster is still looking great and turning heads eight years on. 

 

Our next stop was the church of St Martin. There are a lot of churches dedicated to St Martin in our area and even a pilgrimage route that takes you around many of them before finishing in Tours. Parts of this church date back to the 12^th Century, but it was an unusual feature on the interieur walls that stood out for me. Bignac has the rare remains of a “litre funeraire” painted on the walls, dating from 1680. This black funeral band shows the parish in respectful mourning for the lord of the manor, one François VI de la Rochefoucauld, Baron of Montignac and author of the “Maxims” a collection of moral wisdoms and reflections first published in 1665. The La Rochefoucauld family not only have links with the Château de Javarzay, but they are also descendants from Lusignan family tree, so sitting at the top of their family crest, that appears at regular intervals along the black band, is la fée Mélusine, a legendary fairy (part woman, part serpent) whose story I love. 

 

If this isn’t enough, Bignac also has a pretty lavoir, (wash house) along the river, where we also found a memorial to a Resistance parachute drop in 1944. If it weren’t for the biting flies at the waterside, we’d have stayed much longer than we did.