Église et pont roman de Saint-Généroux

Saint-Généroux

In the 6th century, a monk from Rome, Generosus — Généroux in French — entered the abbey of Ension, today's Saint-Jouin-de-Marnes, one of the oldest monastic foundations in Gaul. Hagiographic tradition relates that his discretion and spiritual prudence, joined to great austerity, led to his being chosen as father abbot, an office he exercised with compassion for his monks. Over his tomb, on the banks of the Thouet, rose a sanctuary that became a priory of Saint-Jouin, and the village took his name. The present church, most often dated to the 10th century — some scholars now lean towards the 11th — ranks among the oldest in France: a pre-Romanesque architecture of striking simplicity, a single nave separated from the sanctuary by a wall pierced by three arcades surmounted by openings, an east end with apsidal chapels, decoration achieved by the stonework alone, in triangles and strings of roundels. Altered in the 12th century and restored in the 19th, it preserves in the chancel medieval capitals of great rarity. Below, in the 12th and 13th centuries the monks of Saint-Jouin-de-Marnes threw a bridge one hundred and twenty-six metres long across the Thouet: five arches, three round-headed and two pointed, carrying a paved roadway where pedestrians took refuge in the triangular cutwater bays when the carts went by. A church of the earliest days, a bridge of the monks, a slow river: Saint-Généroux offers, in a single glance, a thousand years of rural Poitevin Christianity.

Getting there : Church at the heart of the village (1 bis rue de l'Église), between Airvault and Thouars on the D46. The Romanesque bridge spans the Thouet below, a few minutes' walk away; picnic areas by the water.

Opening times and access details are given as a guide only: check before you set out.

Ambient sound