Adrift among islands

This ‘Robinson Crusoe-style adventure’ brought together 80 people on dozens of makeshift rafts, escorted by the fleet’s flagship barge, stripped of its 75-horsepower motor for the occasion: La Fillonnerie. Between songs, memories come flooding back of epic bridge crossings by kedging and spectacular stopovers where the inspired public would always generously fill the collection hat for those who ventured out onto the river’s eddies, unaided by any motor. As their journey drew to a close, these riverboaters – seasoned and occasional alike – collectively dropped anchor at Le Pré-Commun in Saint-Jean-de-Boiseau – the very spot from which, on the last day of August 2023, the first crews of La Grande Remontée set off. In September, the next edition of this upriver boat trip will once again stop off here, hosted by the La Déhale association, on this strip of land that is periodically bathed by the brackish waters of the Loire at spring tides.

A close bond with the river and its inhabitants

Who knows if, during this voyage lasting 23 days and as many nights, some newly formed islands – or perhaps some older ones – might be named? During La Dérive, one strip of land symbolising the liberation from the chauvinistic scars we wanted to leave behind was indeed dubbed ‘the Bare-Breasted Island’. On a different note, opposite Le Péliau – the home port of La Rabouilleuse-École de Loire, just east of Tours – a small island owes its name to the night heron, a tribute from local riverboaters to the wading bird that has migrated all the way here from West Africa. Whilst there are countless islands ‘of cows’ or ‘of beavers’, the ‘island of asparagus’, though rarer, also exists: the winter flow cuts it off from the plain and a regular visitor comes to forage for wild shoots, provided that the high water levels in April haven’t flooded the area.

The legacy of the river folk lives on today, more than thirty-five years after the ‘revival of the Loire rivercraft’, through the stories and names left behind on the islands. The Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) associated with the nautical knowledge of the Loire is expressed through this close bond with the river and its inhabitants, woven into a raft of diverse initiatives, which also carries away its disharmonies, and, across the generations, concerns all those who keep an eye on the water level, as one might milk on the hob.

Basile Maytraud
Aspiring anthropologist, member of the ICH team associated with nautical knowledge of the Loire