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THE CITY OF
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SILLERY AND SAINT FOY
Leaving Cap Rouge, we are once more confronted by a total lack of signage. I haven't seen anything whatever to tell me where the Chemin du Roy goes from here and I'm beginning to feel that my guess that it followed along the foot of Cap Rouge, a road now barred to vehicular traffic, may well have been correct.
In fact, thinking about it, the old city of Quebec was situated around the port area at the foot of Cap Diamant and even though by the time that the Chemin du Roy had been built, the centre of the city was up at the top of the Cape round by where the Place d'Armes is today, there was still a substantial settlement down at the port (as there is indeed today).
Furthermore, when Cap Rouge was in the hands of the Cent Associés and late, Jacques Archambault in the 17th Century, all of Quebec's settlement would have still been down at the port. It is logical to assume that there would have been a track between Cap Rouge and the port area of Quebec, and it would have been along the shoreline.
However, as I said, by the time that the Chemin du Roy was completed, the important part of the city of Quebec was up on Cap Diamant around the Place d'Armes and the principal street that led there was the Grande Allee and its extensions.
It seemed likely that if I could not find any indication of the continuation of the Chemin du Roy to the east, then if I took myself to the Porte St Louis at the eastern end of the Grande Allee and headed west, I might pick up the signs in the reverse direction. You may remember that I did just that earlier today.
Putting my theory into practice, I carried straight on along the road and turned right by the waterworks a little further down. And why did I do that? Simply that I was following a bus of the Quebec public transport system - the RTC Quebec - and last year I had seen this particular route number on a bus in the Grande Allee, and The Lady Who Lives In The SatNav did the rest.
My theory actually did work (and no-one is more surprised than me) and so what I'll do now is to assemble the photographs in the correct order, travelling from west to east.
Back down to the foot of Cap Rouge, do a U turn and head back to the brow of the hill, and the road that you are looking for is the one on the right just there, where you'll notice the white car.
It's not very likely that the white car will be there when you come to make the journey and so it would have been a good idea if Brain of Britain here had made a note of the street name. But still, you get what you pay for and you've paid nothing for this journey, and it was the 1960s psychedelic group Love that sang
"at my request, you ask for nothing. You get nothing in return"
on the album Forever Changes
If by the way you do have a pang of conscience about having for free the result of four years of my time and effort (not to mention my substantial financial input) then give consideration to making your next "Amazon" purchases via the links on the sidebar to the left.
It costs you nothing extra but I receive a small commission that helps defray the cost of the web-hosting.
No sign at the next road junction of course. You can't go straight on as you'll crash through the garage of that house ahead and find yourself on the railway line.
Turning right brings you eventually to the car park where I left the Dodge while I went for a prowl around the Tracel de Cap Rouge in 2012, but we are going to turn left. That's the direction of the modern city centre.
Here's a better view of the road that you need to take. We've come in from the left by those rocks and we are going straight on down there in front of us.
Behind us is that parking for the Tracel de Cap Rouge and maybe it is significant that the road into the city carries on in a straight line here, directly to Cap Rouge and Cartier's old settlement at Charlesbourg Royale. The drop that would be required to bring the road down to river-level wouldn't have phased the Romans, as anyone who has ever been to Birdlip in Gloucestershire will testify.
Mind you, Roman civil engineers were, it has to be said, in a completely different class than Lanouiller. You can still find Roman roads, such as that over Blackstone Edge on the Yorkshire-Lancashire border to name but one example out of many, where traffic is running on the original Roman road surface. Why Lanouiller chose a plank road when there is no shortage whatever of suitable roadstone is something that I could never understand.
We are now in Sillery, in the Chemin St Louis and here on the corner of the Rue Vautelet we come to a shuddering halt. I've been looking for some decent spots from which I can take different photos of the Pont de Quebec and here is one, right on front of my eyes.
Not a particularly good spec for a photo, unfortunately. I'm certain that we can do much better than this. It is in fact already on my list of things to do.
But while I'm parked up here, I can make an addition to my collection of "Teach Yourself Québecois" photos.
You'll notice in this sign that what we have is a logement á louer. There's nothing wrong with that as far as spelling and grammar go, but in fact the sign really tells you little of anything that's important. You would never ever see a sign like that in Europe.
What you would see in Europe would be "maison (house) á louer", "appartement (flat) á louer", " or flat or studio (a one-room flat) á louer" etc., and there might be a qualification to say whether or not the property in question was meublé, (furnished). I didn't see a single sign like that in Québec - everything I saw was a logement á louer.
"And who is St Louis?" I hear you say.
He is the French King Louis IX who led a couple of the Crusades - the Seventh and Eighth if my memory serves me well (as Julie Driscoll sang on This Wheel's on Fire) - to a spectacular disaster in the 13th Century.
And here we are - our journey is almost complete. This is the junction of the Chemin St Louis with the Grande Allee.
You can see, for once, a sign, just there on the pole to the extreme right of the photo, telling us to turn left onto the Grande Allee. From here, the route takes us straight on past the 1759 battlefield of the Plains of Abraham, under the Porte St Louis, down the hill and round the corner into the Place d'Armes.
But I've not finished yet with Sillery and Saint Foy. As for Sillery, there's a lot more to see and I'll be doing something about that in due course, but there was something at Saint Foy that I wanted to see.
As a schoolboy in the UK, I was always led to believe that defeat at the battle of 1759 marked the collapse of the French in North America and that nothing more needed to be said. However, that is far from the case.
The British were holed up in Quebec with control of the river access, but there was still a substantial French presence in Montreal, and in early 1760 the French sent an army to capture Quebec.
A battle was fought at Saint Foy that April where the French actually defeated the British, but in contrast to the panic-stricken flight of the French in 1759, the british retreated in good order to behind the fortifications of the city and dug in to patiently await developments.
Meanwhile, two fleets arrived at the mouth of the frozen St Lawrence estuary- one French and one English. The first to arrive at Quebec would swing the seige into that country's favour. A naval battle took place in the Baie des Chaleurs, the Battle of Restigouche, and we are told that the French fleet was anéantie, which is of course French for "wiped out".
The British fleet proceeded unmolested up to the city of Quebec, the French from their vantage point at the Bois de Coulogne saw them coming. Fearing being cut off in the rear, the French retreated to Montreal in some disorder, followed by a now-reinforced and reprovisioned British army
On September 8th 1760 it was all over.
So what was the point of all of that then?
Tha answer is that I was going to find the site of the Battle of St Foy. The place to start for that was in the Parc des Braves, right by the modern site of the Laval University, and so while I was just around the corner, that was my next port of call.
However, I had failed to take account of one important factor. Today is the "rentrée", when the University students start back to class. The whole of the Chemin St Foy was heaving with thousands of people, cars, buses, all that kind of thing. There was no parking along the road and by my reckoning most of Quebec's city police farce was out there controlling the traffic.
There was no point in doing anything about this today and I added it to the list of things to do for 2014.
I turned round and went to look for the Pont de Quebec instead. That's in Saint Foy too.
Also in Saint Foy (at least, I think that we are still in Saint Foy) is where I stopped for lunch on the Satuday that I arrived here in 2012. We're on the Boulevard Champlain right on the shore of the St Lawrence just below the Plains of Abraham. This is also my hire car for that year - another Dodge Grand Caravan.
Quite ironically, the place where I stopped for lunch back in October 2010 was actually on the other side of the river right opposite this particular spot, and I remember back then taking a photo of the church that is towering over me halfway up the cliff.
As an aside, when I was out at Tracel de Cap Rouge earlier that morning I made the comment that the strong wind seemed to have dropped and that it was threatening to be a gorgeous day. But that didn't last very long. The wind has now started to blow again - its blowing like crazy, in fact - and that's going to cool everything down.
I'll better hurry up and eat my butty and find this confounded bridge before it starts to snow.
And don't laugh about the snow either. It was only two days ago that I was coping with a snowstorm as I drove into Trois Rivieres . Anything can happen in Canada.
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