KNOCKING ON HEAVEN'S DOOR

Before we left the Mill, we drove over to Rocamadour, to which we had never been before. It’s a fairish distance from our corner of the Cantal - about and hour an a half - and feels longer cramped in the back of a car. It’s a religious site, a place of pilgrimage - a deep gorge on the side of whose vertiginous cliffs.....well, let me tell the story.

Saint Amadour is one of those obscure early saints that litter the Catholic calendar. I presume he was male, for I doubt a woman would have chosen to live her life, as he did, three quarters of the way up a towering rocky cliff, like some species of seabird. He began as a hermit making a cliff-side cave his hermitage and meditating on the view. Subsequently, he was joined by other hermits who took over other caves. Hermits indeed being social folk despite appearances to the contrary.

In due course Amadour died. Perhaps he had had enough of the view. Anyway, the other hermits carved a sarcophagus for him out of the soft rock, still some three hundred feet or so up this crag, and sealed him in, no doubt accompanied by the usual ceremonies that hermits engage in when one of their number departs for an even greater hermitage at a still more elevated altitude.

And that was that. Nothing much happened for five or six hundred years. But then, just after the turn of the millennium, (that’s the first millennium, not the one just gone) someone came across the Amadour tomb and decided - in true Halloween style - to open it up.

And in true Halloween style old Amadour did not disappoint. For there he was, presumably still fully clothed, and perfectly preserved. Which, when the Pope came to hear of it, was enough to have old Amadour beatified and for the cliff to be re-christened Roc-Amadour and for people to make pilgrimages there for the next thousand years.

Indeed, so well has the little community of Rocamadour done down the ages out of their perfectly preserved hermit that one is tempted to think that perhaps someone removed what remained of Amadour and popped a succession of recently deceased locals into the tomb when anyone came to inspect. But to think that would be to remove the magic.

For Rocamadour is magic - pure spiritual magic - carved in white stone. There’s the little town at the base of the cliff, full of hotels and restaurants and boutique-y shops selling tourist porn - the endless cheap (and not so cheap) souvenir tat, much of it made in Asia, that disfigure any site to which international tourists flock like so many seagulls on a rubbish tip.

But from this unenterprising beginning leads ‘Le Grand Escalier’ - a great staircase of 226 stone steps mounting towards (but never actually reaching) the cliff top. It is a staircase to heaven.

As one mounts, in a series of zig-zagging flights, interrupted by oases of elegant medieval piazzas, you feel you are leaving behind the material things of the world and approaching something pure and spiritual.

You leave behind the modern world with its cars and shops and ascend to the early middle ages. An ecclesiastical building blocks your way - you pass through a door - but then you see that the edifice has only one side. You pass through a wall but the far side is open and the stairway draws you on and ever upward.



Finally you reach the Church of the Black Madonna with its great stained glass window beside the tomb of Saint Amadour - or rather the bottom half of the sarcophagus carved into the rock. Above you - and worryingly over you - towers the rest of the cliff, which actually overhangs this religious ‘city.’ Worse still, the overhang is built on, which makes you feel that it is only the whim of the Almighty that prevents the entire cliff collapsing like the Twin Towers with each upper collapse taking out the floor beneath. No wonder pilgrims tremble.

I am not a religious person, but, as I stood within the walls of this beautiful, capacious church with its high vaulted roof, suspended as it were between earth and sky, accessible only by a staircase of 226 steps, it was easy to understand why it had for almost a thousand years become a pilgrimage for Kings and Christians.

Hamlet’s words “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” came to mind.

A row of candles burnt brightly in the dim religious gloom: votive offerings which I used to be encouraged by my old great aunt to make when she was alive. I feel her nagging at me still to 'put a candle on,' whenever I enter a Catholic church. Usually I resist.

This time, quite overcome, I dropped my two euros into the box and lit a flame. After a token prayer I turned around and descended the staircase again in bright sunshine.