Photographers in Vézelay & the Morvan

Vézelay is a village of a few hundred people on a ridge above the Cure, and almost all of it is one street. Rue Saint-Pierre climbs from the lower gate past yellow-rendered houses, stone lintels, wine shops and a couple of galleries to the top of the hill, where the basilica of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine stands. The church is the reason the village exists: a twelfth-century Cluniac pilgrimage church, a starting point of the road to Santiago, and the place where Bernard of Clairvaux preached the Second Crusade in 1146. Inside, the nave is built in alternating pale and dark stone with a bare barrel of transverse arches, and the light comes down it from the east; on clear days around the summer solstice the midday sun drops a line of light patches along the central axis. It is a working church, entry is free, and services are the constraint that matters — a session waits them out rather than photographing through them. Behind the basilica the terrace of the old abbots' château opens over the whole Cure valley: hedged fields, woods, the ridge lines of the Morvan behind. The Morvan itself begins twenty minutes south-east — granite, forest, and a chain of reservoir lakes on the Cure, of which the Lac du Crescent is the nearest at about half an hour and the Lac des Settons, an hour on, the best known. Vézelay is at its emptiest before ten in the morning; by midday in July and August the street carries coaches, and in winter half the village shuts. Late spring and September are the honest recommendation.