It’s not always easy to see where travel literature starts and finishes. Look at the travel section of any bookshop and you can find many books that are really about a sense of place. I love these kind of books and I know, from emails, that many of you do to. If this includes you then there are some great new titles around, or just about to be published.

Last year I reviewed Connemara: Listening To The Wind, the first part of of Tim Robinson’s trilogy on Connemara and a lot of you followed this up. At the moment I’m reading volume two of the series, “Connemara: the Last Pool of Darkness”. This is more about people and communities than landscape and geography but it is a wonderful book. A proper review will follow when I’ve finished it.

My attention has been caught with a new book from one of my very favourite ‘place’ writers, Gillian Tindall. I thought it was time that I featured her work here.

Gillian Tindall first came to my attention over a decade ago. I was browsing through the Observer Review section and I caught a reference to a tiny village I know in France, Chassignolles. Chassignoles is nothing special and nowhere in particular. It is situated in classic ‘France Profonde’ countryside, somewhere between the Loire and the Masif Central. I only know the village through being a regular visitor to another tiny place —St. Chartier — which has a greta, annual, traditional music festival. I was intrigued with the review and bought the book

Celestine: Voice from A French Village

‘Celestine’ was the book that caught my eye. It is a wonderful story and a superb piece of writing.

Gillian Tindall has owned a tiny second home in this village for many years. One of her neighbours died and — as is traditional — the family marked out something for Gillian to take to remember her neighbour by (it was a chair I think). Not being in permanent residence it was a while before Tindall could pick up the chair and by the time she arrived the house was completely cleared. However, she did notice an old metal tin on a windowsill that nobody appeared to want. She asked about it, was told it was of no interest to anyone, and given it to take home.

The box contained a series of letter, love letter from various suitors to a woman who lived around the turn of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Fascinated by the letters Tindall began to wonder about the life that this woman lived and she began to research her life as best she could.

“Celestine” details not only the research into Celestine but in a sense a bigger project. By working through the Department Archives in Chateauroux Tindall, in fact, began to piece together the history of the village and the surrounding area. While Celestine always managed to be a little on the elusive side the archives were able to tell a rich story with many of the patterns of local fields still visible today.

Celestine lived through a time of great change. When she was born the word ‘etranger’ was used to designate somebody that came from out of the valley — this is the Vallée Noire that Georges Sand wrote about. The book describes a host of modern developments, including the arrival of the first train line. Local Council records show how threatening this was to local people. Trains meant the end of the world and the community spent the best part of twenty years awaiting for it to arrive. When the train finally did come local women were quickly taking day trips to La Rochelle, something akin these days to space tourism. Sadly, economics meant that the train line disappeared after very few years.

In writing ‘Celestine’ Tindall was effectively giving her neighbours back the history that had been forgotten over time. We gain a great insight into the lives of these communities and, in particular, into the lives of local women. Celestine herself died in the local town La Chatre, childless I believe.

If any of this sounds interesting to you then make an effort to track this down. Is a fascinating and beautiful book.

The House by the Thames: and the People Who Lived There

This was the second Tindall book that caught my eye. Tindall is fascinated — as so am I — by a small collection of ancient cottages that sit on the south side of the Thames in Southwark, not far from Borough Market. The house is at 49 Bankside.

Every time I pass this way I’m attracted by this small line of cottages that sit so out of place now with so many modern development.

Tindall painstakingly researched the area and the history of the house. She has produced a fascinating story or inns, dangerous folk and criminals, Thames watermen and coal merchants. ‘The House by the Thames’ is a wonderful book and — in many ways — paints a richer picture of life on the river than did Peter Ackroyd in his ‘biography’ of the Thames.

Footprints of Paris

Footprints is Tindall’s latest book, which isn’t published until next month. The pre-publicity suggests that she has taken the research and story telling methology of ‘Celestine’ and ‘The House’ and has applied them to a couple of streets in the Latin Quarter of Paris.

Being a fan of both Paris and Tindall I can’t wait for this book. The publicity blurb describes it so:

Gillian Tindall is well known for her ability to breathe a passionate life Into the generations of those who have walked this earth before us. Here, using a handful of lives and a specific location to exemplify 200 years of history, she focuses on a few of the oldest streets in Paris’ Latin Quarter. Her study shows how Paris has drawn into its magnetic field people who have variously found there education or enlightenment, a refuge or a secret garden, even a different identity. Half a dozen individuals, all related in some way, reveal a web of human feeling and experiences across two centuries. There is the young doctor who walked all the way from Edinburgh to Paris at the time of Napoleon’s downfall; the self-made Victorian businessman who traded with the brash capital of the Second Empire; his reserved son who found in the old stones of Paris a refuge from his fraught childhood; Maud, the archetypal English spinster, who somehow managed to construct an alternative existence in Paris; and Julia, young and desperate, who found her own unlikely salvation there in a very different era.

Gillian Tindall is a writer who is worth getting to know.