Saturday 19 May 2018

Visites protocolaires

I have just found a lovely phrase from writer Julien Gracq: les visites protocolaires, by which he means the 'obligatory' visit to the five-star attraction.

It's rather a wonderful phrase. It doesn't actually dismiss such sights, but it very nicely sums up the somewhat institutional nature of such visits - and the fact that we are not always (perhaps not often) free to choose how we see such places.

Contrast, for instance, Stonehenge, the visite protocolaire, and Stanton Drew, a pair of stone circles in the middle of nowhere, not even in the top ten megalithic monuments in the UK.

Stonehenge has to be experienced the way everyone sees it - through the visitor centre, into the fenced compound with the crowds. It's impressive, but unless you're there at midsummer (which I really must do some time, it's always going to be the same; crowded, something to gawp at.

At Stanton Drew some years ago, I wandered in, putting a pound in the honesty box, and found the circles delightfully inhabited by children playing a game of tag around the stones, and families picnicking. It wasn't till someone hailed me - "Blessed be!" - and offered me bread, cheese, and a cup of wine, that I realised it was Beltane.

My way of experiencing Stonehenge a bit differently was to walk away from it. It's part of a superb, huge-scale sacred site, stretching from Woodhenge (now with concrete discs where the post-holes were) to the Normanton Down Barrows and the great swath of the Cursus cut through the landscape. I walked all the sacred sites around Stonehenge in a huge circle; sometimes I could see Stonehenge, more often not, but I felt its presence. Instead of the claustrophobic confines of a fenced compound, I had the liberty of Salisbury Plain, the wide chalk landscape and the huge open sky.

Visites protocolaires have something to be said for them, even if, sometimes, it's just that you never have to do them again, that you'll never regret not seeing the Taj Mahal. And if you want to study Mughal architecture, you do need to see the Taj - but you also need to see Sikandra, and Agra Fort, and Itimad-ud-Daula, so you'll need a week in Agra to do things properly. Sites such as Chartres Cathedral, Avebury, or St Peter's, Rome, are on the list for a reason; so are Mount Bromo and the Pennine Way.

But it's the little things you see along the way that sometimes make the most impact; a fern-fringed fountain in a Breton forest, an orange-painted stone under a banyan tree.

The pity is that some people spend all their time chasing from one visite protocolaire to another, without noticing what's in between. Modern tourism is expressly laid out to enable you to do this; and modern tourists, only too often, are intolerant of the in-between. They're bored once they've seen the big sight; they get back on the bus, they chomp crisps or read or book or chat, and never look out of the windows.

Manners makyth man, but protocol does not make a traveller.

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