Advent postcards, La Faye, Charente

 

Advent postcard, La Faye, Charente

Advent day 15

We are not travelling too far from home for today’s cycling advent-ures postcard, but it’s still a village with a story to tell.

 

La Faye, situated just under five kilometres from Ruffec is somewhere that holds special memories for us as it has become our tradition to spend Christmas Day lunch there. We wrap up warmly, pack our posh picnic and cycle to La Faye, where there is the most perfect of picnic spots. The sturdy table is not just under cover but is also protected on two sides by the renovated village bread oven. The spire of the church surveys the scene and there is even a toilet in the car park and a baguette vending machine for our fresh bread. We couldn’t really ask for more, but this year the commune have dug a pond next to the bread oven, so we might even get ducks to feed this Christmas.

 

This September we made another visit to La Faye, in the footsteps once again of my favourite French industrialist Jean-François Cail. It seemed rather bizarre that we had travelled hundreds of kilometres to visit his iron railway bridge in Moulins, but we’d never seen the agricultural domaine he set up near Ruffec in 1853. Despite having left the area as a teenager and made his fortune in Paris and the north of France, he retired to La Faye and its impressive manor house, situated only twenty kilometres from where he was born in Chef-Boutonne (in 1804).

 

He chose the land as he could easily make the journey by train from Paris to Ruffec and although the soil and the buildings were in a poor state when he bought them, he expanded the farm from 160 ha to 308 ha. He radically moved away from traditional cereals and the crops to feed cattle, planting beets and installing a distillery to turn them into alcohol, something that would have been a risky decision in an area so close to Cognac. He died at La Faye in 1871. 

The farm might have changed radically in the last hundred and fifty-two years, but some of the farm buildings and the manor house are still there. It seemed fitting to pause for a moment before continuing on 112km birthday bike ride.