Travels with my Donkey

eighteen of those arches now span cultivated or developed land, and the town it finally opens into, Hospital de Órbigo, is a bypassed settlement of negligible contemporary scale and importance. As oversized and incongruously sited river crossings go, it's right up there with London Bridge, Arizona. And like that structure, the Puente del Paso Honroso has enjoyed an improbably colourful history, which I related to my dehydrated offspring as we crossed it.
    It's 1434, and you're a knight from León who finds himself hopelessly infatuated with an unusually inexcitable damsel. What to do? Well, if your name is Don Suero de Quiñones, every Thursday you wear an iron fetter round your neck. 'This signifies my binding love,' you wheeze painfully, as the fair lady sneers past in the gilded horse-drawn divan of Don Mueble. No matter — it is the age of chivalry, which means you have nothing better to do, and so with the King's permission you organise a jousting tournament with the intention of demonstrating your worth in the grandest manner imaginable: personally offering out every noble horseman in Europe. 'I'll do them all, and I'll do the bastards right here!' you shout, stamping a cleated shoon upon the bridge's central span, before a page whispers in your ear that it's hardly wide enough for one horse to pass, let alone two, so you cough a bit and quietly order the construction of seven jousting arcades in the next-door field. The tents and canopies go up; the word is passed through royal courts across the known world. A life-size mannequin is dressed as a herald and stuck in a hedgerow alongside the nearby camino, and because this is a holy year, no one draws a cock on his tabard.
    Noblemen arrive in their hundreds; the stands fill with under-toothed locals and curious pilgrims; feasts are prepared. And then, on 11 July, your first challenger hoists his lance at the distant end of the palisade — a Catalan knight encumbered in a double thickness of steel armour. In a display of quixotic derision you strip off your own light armour and don a flouncy woman's camisole. The crowd cheers drunkenly, and they barely stop for twenty-eight days, at the end of which you hold aloft, in weary triumph, the last splintered stump of 300 rival lances. One knight lies dead, and some leather-aproned inebriate with a rusty saw is looming over a dozen groaning others.
    The last true medieval tournament is at an end, and in fitting conclusion you lead a glorious procession to Santiago, hanging a gold band round St James in holy emulation of your own iron fetter, now discarded. 'Pray, good sire, whither the fair lady?' enquires a manservant, and you tell him that was never really the point, and hold forth at great length about the chivalric ethos, and then he asks again and you start crying and tell him to shut up.
    Twenty-four years later, an armoured horseman approaches as you're riding across a field. He raises his visor curiously. 'Don't I know you from somewhere?' he asks, and you clear your throat and for the thousandth time begin to tell your tale, except when you get to the bit about the camisole he kills you.
    It looks to have been pretty much downhill for Hospital de Orbigo ever since, though the children enjoyed some medieval high jinks in the dangerously ill-maintained municipal playground, and so did I in seeing off a posse of spirited youngsters who clustered aggressively round Shinto after I'd tied him up in a grove of trees by the bridge. Poor Shints. No sooner had his tormentors slunk away than nature turned on him again: a gathering wind loosened a blizzard of seed-fluff from the boughs above and carpeted his dinner in cotton wool.
    We could hear his sneezing brays from the tiny room all five of us were wedged in, and so of course could all the other guests from theirs. In contrast with the night before, plenty of pilgrims stayed here — that much was plain from the 'No HANG OUT THE WASHING IN THE WINDOW' notice Sellotaped to the splashback — and an unfamiliar group of elderly Dutch ones occupied the bar as we walked out to find food. By now I was familiar with the word 'donkey' in most European tongues, and hearing dark mutters about 'de ezel' I knew they feared for their sleep. And rightly so: the next morning Shinto bugled the whole town out of bed at 5 a.m.
    Because we didn't know that then, we lingered over our meal. The restaurant I found down a careworn backstreet offered simple fare, but we had an outside