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Tournus cathedral: the Romanesque par excellence

I admit that I’m a sucker for a good piece of Romanesque. Gothic I can take or leave, but there’s something about those massive pillars, reaching determinedly for the sky at a time when their builders had far less technology and knowledge than had been available to the Romans, that just draws me in. And the pillars in Tornus cathedral are real beauties, as is the whole building – unspoilt by more than the occasional touch of Gothic pretension and Romantic excess.

It isn’t, it has to be said, particularly a beauty from the outside. Typically the towers don’t match – here because of a 12th-century bell tower. And the face presented to the world is forbidding and almost blank – fitting for a site that was almost as much fortress as church, built (mostly) at the end of the 10th century to replace a monastery partially destroyed by Hungarian invaders.

(The view from the cloister)

On a hot summer’s day, however, once you’re inside the narthex, with those wonderful pillars (1.5m in circumference, and made of simple, small local pink ochre, heavily mortared, envelop you, and there’s even the remnants of the some very early wall paintings. There are also some rather lovely 16th and 17th-century circular gravestones. (Not something I can recall seeing before.)

The official guide sends you next of the narrow winding staircase (highly defensible, should those Hungarians return) to the chapel directly above. Looking towards the church there’s a triumphal arch decorated with “some of the earliest known Romaneque art”, which shows in its grotesquery a typical sense of fun. Here the builders showed what soaring meant in the 10th century, and really it wasn’t a bad effort at all.

When you get to the nave there are more of those lovely pillars, and also unusual tranverse barrel vaulting – usually used on bridges and known in only one other cathedral, Mont Saint Vincent, not far from here – the builders really were making it up as they went along.

The ambulatory boasts another gem – a rare 12th-century mosaic (although if you hadn’t read the label you’d suspect Roman – the zodiac has a distinctly pagan feel about it).

The crypt, date tentatively to the late 10th, is an unexpected gem, echoing the shape and styling of the ambulatory above. There’s an old well, surrounded by Roman columns – the guide suggests this may have been used for baptisms, but it would also make sense in the “church as fortress”.

To the side of the church, what was once the monks’ warming room is now a small sculpture gallery, the highlight of which are two column statues of St Philbert (a political exile – he opposed the “tyrannical, murderous conduct of Ebroin, the Master of the Palace of the kingdom of the Franks” to quote the guidebook, and founder of his own order of monks – 616-685)and Saint Valerian.

What are said to be St Philbert’s remains are still here – his monks, fleeing the Norman invasions (685-836) brought them here after 39 years of wandering around France seeking a new home.

But there’s a lot more to Tournus than just the cathedral. The town itself is a real gem of a moving time capsule – at ground level it has the normal shops etc, but look up above them and you’re likely to encounter just about anything from the 13th-century onwards. There’s plenty of exposed timbering, but also random Roman stones, walls that show the impact of multiple rebuildings through time.

There’s also an ideal spot for lunch, by the Saone. The waiters from the Charles IV restaurant might have to run back and forth between the restaurant (on the main commercial square), and the tables by the river, but it definitely made the lunch – although there was nothing to complain about in my scallops in creamy white wine sauce (although I’m not sure I really needed to exactly know the wine and the year), or the “cherry soup” for desert.