Our route through the French countryside then took us to Chézelles, a very small rural commune in Indre-et-Loire, away from the better-known towns and major attractions of the Loire Valley. With barely more than a hundred inhabitants, it is the kind of place that can easily be crossed in a few minutes, but travelling by motorhome gives us the opportunity to stop in places like this and see a side of France that is very different from the busy tourist centres.
Chézelles has a surprisingly long history. The settlement is mentioned in written sources as early as 1032 under the name Chesellae villa, and the surrounding landscape remains almost entirely agricultural, with isolated houses, farms, small hamlets and fields stretching across the Touraine countryside. The village itself is very small, centred around its mairie and church, without the shops, traffic or activity that characterise larger towns.
The most interesting historic site in the commune is actually found a little away from the centre, in the hamlet of Lièze. The Église Notre-Dame-et-Saint-Sauveur has origins in the eleventh century and preserves several different phases of construction. Part of the nave belongs to the original medieval church, while the western façade and its rounded Romanesque portal were rebuilt during the twelfth century. Further alterations followed during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, leaving a building in which several periods of rural church architecture can still be seen. Lièze once had its own parish and a priory connected with the Abbey of Beaumont, before eventually being incorporated into Chézelles during the nineteenth century.
There is very little here in the conventional tourist sense, and that was part of the character of our stop. Chézelles is not a place built around visitors, monuments or organised attractions; it is simply a very small French village surrounded by countryside. After the much more obvious attractions of the Loire Valley and places such as Le Grand-Pressigny and La Roche-Posay, it gave us another short glimpse of rural France and of the many tiny communities that we encounter simply because we are travelling slowly rather than moving directly from one major destination to another.