St-Jacques-Guerets, Loir Valley

Église St-Jacques des Guérets

(Guérets - fallow lands; Fallow - uncultivated or ploughed but unsown)

Link to Maps of the Pilgrimage Roads of France

Back to Loir Valley Pilgrimage Churches

One branch of the via Turonensis, the pilgrim's road to Santiago de Compostela from Paris, followed the Loir River Valley (not the same as the Loire River Valley - that's bigger and further south!) for a lot of the way from Chartres to Tours. Here are some photos of the little pilgrimage church of St-Jacques des Guérets (Guérets are fallow uncultivated lands). The church dates from the 1100s, with paintings done in the 1100s and 1200s.

The Vendome tourist people list over 20 churches in the area with frescos, but we rather think that most of these are very fragmentary or in at least one case (bad) modern, and that this church and the nearby St-Genest, in Lavardin, are the best for simple beauty and getting a feel for what it was like when churches were painted, which they all were.

The simple little frescoed medieval pilgrimage church of St-Jacques des Guérets

We missed the chequered St-George with skewered dragon on the side of the main window recess.

Christ Pantocrator in Mandorla frame with evangelist tetramorph - the eagle of John, the lion of Mark, the ox of Luke and the angel of Matthew. It's a great eagle, the unusual lion could be down to the distance between north east France and lion-land, but the ox is a bit of a medieval worry! Underneath is three-quarters of a Last Supper - diners on the right having been lost to plaster deterioration.