This village has an intensely pretty setting in the high Jura meadows below Champagnole. Forested hills rise up to the east, and the narrow roads snake through the brightest green imaginable. There had been no proper rain since March, and this was now August, but the altitude is so high here that the morning dews are enough to keep the meadows fresh. Brown cows, their bells sounding hauntingly across the valley, were busy turning it all into Comté cheese.

From a distance, le Vaudioux promised a lot, gathered as it was around a spire; but when I got there I found the ugliest church I had seen so far in the Jura. It is one of those blocky mock-classical temples of the 1830s, familiar from anonymous towns across western Europe - or anywhere else, come to that. It appeared to have come off a production line in the Vatican; I wondered what had been destroyed for it to be built. The pantiles only made it worse.

It wasn't open, and there was nobody about to ask. The only sound apart from the distant cows was a television set blaring from an open window.

Not the place's fault; for a moment, I paraphrased Philip Larkin. Ugliness, like loveliness, happens anywhere.

And then I got back on my bike and climbed onwards to Châtelneuf, up, up, up.

Le Vaudioux is just to the west of the main N5 between Champagnole and Geneva.