A serpentine cycle ride from Dunkirk to the Pyrenees

In 2000, to celebrate the Millennium, the Paris Meridian was designated la Méridienne verte, the Green Meridian, with thousands of trees to be planted along its length “establishing a strong relationship between new generations and the environment”, trailways opened, and places of floral celebration made. It was launched on Bastille Day, 2000, with la fête du Millénaire, a picnic in every commune along the length of the Meridian.

Intrigued to find how this ‘green spine’, this new knitting-together of France, marked by trees now fifteen years grown, had developed, I cycled it, from Dunkirk to the Pyrenees.

As my route crossed and recrossed the Meridian, I visited cathedral cities and battlefields, the broad fields and villages and soft-flowing rivers of la France profond, barren uplands, to the burning South, and returned at last to the smallholding where, forty years ago, I tried to live a rural dream …

This is the daily record of my journey through a country I find ever fascinating, in which the detail build into a mosaic picture of endlessly beguiling France.

330 pages £5 Available from brimstone-press.com

The whole book is in four parts, accessed in the drop-down menu MY BOOKS, ‘In Search of France’s Green Meridian’.