Stone & Story Trail (Paperback)

Paperback. Seventeen centuries of history. One overlooked corner of France. Stop this time.Most people pass through Sarthe on their way to somewhere else. The autoroute carries them south towards the Loire, or west towards the Atlantic coast, and the department slides past the window unremarked. Stone & Story Trail: Sarthe is written for everyone who has done exactly that, and suspects, perhaps, that they missed something.They did.Hidden within the old quarter of Le Mans stand the most completely preserved Gallo-Roman city walls in the whole of northern Europe. They are not ruins. They are not fragments. They rise, in places, to their full Roman height, faced with the warm ochre and terracotta of their original decorative banding, the geometric friezes and polychrome inlays still legible after seventeen hundred years. Most visitors walk past them without understanding what they are looking at. This book changes that.Helen and David Oldham came to Sarthe originally to photograph a book cover. They stayed because the stories would not let them leave. Walking the circuit of the ancient walls, notebook in hand, they found themselves standing before one of the great overlooked monuments of the Roman west, and asking why so few people knew it was there. The answer, they discovered, had everything to do with familiarity, and nothing to do with merit.Stone & Story Trail: Sarthe follows the authors on foot through the layered history of a landscape that has been continuously inhabited, fought over, built upon, and adapted since well before the Romans arrived. The walls of Le Mans were not raised in crisis or panic. The decorative ambition of their construction tells a different story, one of civic confidence, of a prosperous city advertising its own importance to anyone who approached. Understanding that changes how you stand before them.The Plantagenet thread runs through everything. In 2002, the old quarter was renamed Cite Plantagenet, a deliberate act of historical reclamation. Within the circuit of these very walls, Henry II of England was born. The family that would shape the crowns of England and France, whose quarrels would echo from Canterbury to Aquitaine, began here, in this department most travellers treat as a corridor. Stone & Story Trail: Sarthe places Sarthe where it belongs, at the heart of the Angevin story rather than at its margins.The authors live near the region, in the neighbouring department of Mayenne, and that proximity gives the writing a quality no visiting journalist can manufacture. When they descend the Pans-de-Gorron staircase and recognise the Gorron granite in the fabric of a Roman wall as the same stone they see in the field boundaries of their own village, the observation carries real weight. The ancient and the personal collapse into each other, and the distance between a twenty-first-century reader and a fourth-century stonemason narrows to nothing.This is not a guidebook. There are no hotel recommendations, no star ratings, no suggested itineraries. Stone & Story Trail: Sarthe is narrative non-fiction, written to be read in an armchair as comfortably as it is carried in a coat pocket through the medieval streets it describes. The history is rigorous. The prose is unhurried. The sense of wonder is real but never performed.The walls have watched seventeen centuries pass. They show no sign of stopping. This book invites you to stop with them, and to look properly, perhaps for the first time.Ideal for readers of Robert Macfarlane, John Julius Norwich, and Simon Schama, and for anyone who loves France deeply enough to leave the obvious routes behind. The most complete Roman walls in northern Europe stand in Le Mans, overlooked by most. Stone & Story Trail: Sarthe uncovers their Pla Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…