architecture – Taran's Tales

A final stop in the ancient city of Poitiers

“So, let’s go to Poitiers on our way back to Paris”, suggests my beautiful wife one day. “And why would we do that?” I ask. “Simply because I went there back in 1982 and remember it being a very nice old city!”

That seemed as good a reason as any. We wanted somewhere within easy striking distance of Paris CDG and Poitiers was a name I remembered well from my schoolboy history classes as being the site of a key victory for my English ancestors during the Hundred Years War. So, having established there were no undesirable motives for visiting the place, such as reminiscing over a long-lost love on the part of either party, we got busy on the AirBnB website once more where we found Phillippe and his “B&B Chambre élégante, spacieuse Poitiers centre” on rue des 4 Roues, overlooking the river Le Clain.

The fresh, clean waters of the River Dronne in Brantôme

It was a lovely sunny spring day for a drive through the countryside, so we took a detour into the Perigord region to visit Brantôme, a small town on an island in the river La Dronne. Spring flowers were poking up in flowerbeds around the village and the river-bed was alive with bright green grasses. The Dronne river takes an abrupt U-turn around Brantôme, after meeting the limestone cliff that has been the home to many peoples in the past who took to the troglodyte lifestyle in the natural caves worn out by the river over thousands of years. We stretched our legs awhile, taking a few more photos for posterity to add to our already enormous collection from the trip (only to lose them all when we got home as a result of our HDD disaster!). Then we stopped for a coffee at a café beside the river where the poor old waitress seemed to be totally discombobulated, as if the dozen or so customers she had to look after were way beyond anything she had ever experienced before! The Perigord looks very beautiful with it’s rolling hills, woodlands, open farmland and river valleys, and it is easy to understand why so many expats from all over northern Europe have gravitated there over the years.

Phillipe welcomed us warmly on our arrival in Poitiers at the appointed hour and, after giving us a hand with our well stuffed suitcases, showed us around his little ‘jardin biologique’ with its neat raised-beds full of herbs and vegetables and introduced us to his small flock of chickens. The garden backs up to a small limestone cliff into which an old troglodyte dwelling had been carved, similar to those we had seen in Brantôme earlier in the day. Later in the evening we took a short walk to get our first view of the old town centre, and had a tasty supper at La Bonne Quille, the “Veggie Experience” for my health-food loving wife and a tasty piece of monkfish for me.

There is certainly a lot of old architecture to feast one’s eyes on in this very historic city. During our drive there we had read about at least five or six old churches that were worthy of a visit, though having visited, entered and photographed in one way or another, nearly every church, chapel, abbey and cathedral we had passed, or stayed near to, over the previous six months, I felt pretty well ‘churched-out’; so the thought of dragging our irreligious, symbolically near-drowned, brains around yet more such edifices on our last day in Europe did little to excite me. But when we finally returned to our comfortable, warm, five-star digs after nearly five hours plodding around this amazing medieval city on a grey, drizzly day, I can honestly say that if offered to be shown another hundred ‘houses of God’ that were as beautiful as the five or six we saw that day, I could, perhaps, be persuaded to do so, though all in good time of course.

Stain-glass windows in Église Notre-Dame la Grande in Poitiers. An oak tree symbolized strength, authority and longevity, and it was a meeting place in many European countries

Our first stop was to have been at the fourth century Baptistère Saint-Jean, but due to poor research, we found it was closed until 2PM, and thus it ended up at the end of our list for the day. But our walk there had not been without its pleasures, first along the grassy bank of the Le Clain river, past ducks, drooping willows and weirs, and under the over-pass of the Voie André Maisaux, with its two fine examples of street art on the concrete supporting pillars, across the little footbridge, Passerele de Montbernage, and then weaving up through the narrow streets and into the south-east corner of the city. From the closed Baptistère, we carried on upwards towards the pedestrianised city centre, stopping briefly at Cathédrale Saint-Pierre, Poitier’s twelfth century cathedral, then Église de Sainte-Radegonde dating from the sixth century, and so to Église Notre-Dame la Grande, the oldest Romanesque church in France, on Place Charles de Gaulle, amusingly still better known as ‘Place Notre Dame’ by the locals. (This name change had actually led to one rather embarrassed church warden at the door of the cathedral the previous evening who, when asked where we would find our restaurant on Place Charles de Gaulle, had sent us off in completely the wrong direction; for this he later apologized to us profusely, as we bumped into him again after our dinner, explaining his use of the old name for the square and consequent misdirections!)

The Church of Sainte-Radegonde is a medieval Roman Catholic church in Poitiers dating from the 6th century. It takes its name from the Frankish queen and nun, Radegund, who was buried in the church. Considered a saint, the church became a place of pilgrimage. The current church, constructed from the 11th to 12th centuries, was built in a combination of Romanesque and Angevin Gothic architectural styles.

The cornucopia of Romanesque magnificence we had viewed so far in just three churches actually had me almost hankering for more and so we walked yet further along the local streets, all of which are named after persons who are of French historical significance, and have very informative street name-plates with dates etc.; streets with names such as ‘rue Gambetta’, named after Léon Gambetta, a French statesman who came to prominence during the Franco-Prussian war, and ‘rue de Théophraste Renaudot’, a physician, philanthropist and journalist. And so we arrived at the most wonderful church of all, the almost totally Romanesque, Église Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand. The interior of this superb eleventh century example of very early medieval architecture is a glorious feast of stained glass windows, very old murals, beautiful mosaic floors and Romanesque arches, large and small, seen from every angle and from every visual vantage point. It was a wonderful climax to six months of dedicated study of religious architecture by a couple of non-believers!

But we still had one more architectural treasure to visit, the Baptistère dating back to Roman times, although to get there we had to pass through yet another visual surprise, Le Parc de Blossac. Established in 1770 by Paul Esprit Marie de la Bourdonnaye, Count of Blossac, as a private garden on 9 hectares along the ancient city ramparts, it has fine views over the river below and, joy of joys, we saw our first crocuses of spring pushing up through the grass at the foot of the proud beech trees. Even on this dreary grey day the park was a happy place to be, so one can only imagine how pleasant it would be on more clement days.

The Baptistère Saint-Jean (Baptistery of St. John) is a religious edifice in Poitiers (VI century). It is reputed to be the oldest existing Christian building in the West and one of the most prominent examples of Merovingian architecture.

Finally, we arrived at the last destination of our whistle-stop tour of this fine old city, the Baptistère Saint-Jean, a small, unimposing building at first sight after all the grand churches we had visited throughout the day. The central part of the building which dates from the middle of the fourth century, stands on top of the original Roman foundations from a hundred years earlier. The building has undergone many good and bad phases over the years, from its initial designed use as a centre for full immersion baptisms, to severe neglect during the occupation of the Visigoths in the fifth century, through its religious heyday in the late middle ages, to its sale for use as a warehouse after the French Revolution, and on into the twentieth century when its true historical importance was finally recognized. Although over the years it has undergone partial demolition, several additions, and numerous rebuilding projects, when one enters inside it still retains the feel of its Roman origins. There in the middle of the main chamber is the original baptismal tank, and the remains of many beautiful frescoes adorn the walls and the ceiling of the small chapel at the back of the chamber. It is considered to be the oldest existing Christian building in western Europe and is a fine example of Merovingian architecture, that is the period in France’s history from the fifth to the eighth century.

That evening we again followed our host’s recommendations and ate another good meal, this time at La Gazette. But with flat camera batteries and exhausted bodies too tired to write my daily journal, I have no memory of quite what we ate! Back in our comfortable digs, we fell into the sleep of the gods, though which gods I am not too sure, and awoke late the following morning to find Phillipe had left our breakfast for us, laid out very artistically on the dining table downstairs, plenty of fresh croissants, pastries, home-made jams, small cups of fruit, and a large thermos of piping hot coffee, just what we needed to prepare us for facing the harsh world of modernity that awaited us at Paris CDG that evening. We really were going to be on our way home very soon.

An Epilogue, fit for the end of a six-month travel saga!

Arriving back in Paris after a long and generally uninteresting drive from Poitiers culminating in the usual rush-hour traffic-jam going around the Péripherique, we handed in our very enjoyable Peugeot 308 lease car, and took the courtesy bus to our Hotel Mercure, deep in the heart of the Paris CDG airport complex but also very convenient for our 5.30AM check-in the next morning. The hotel was everything you would expect from a business traveller’s perspective, a clean comfortable room, an overpriced buffet-style dining room (no choice, €33 a head to eat all you like, or nothing), and a large bar area populated noisily by the denizens of whatever conference was being held that day. A not-so-nice welcome back to the grim reality of the modern fly-anywhere world! We spent most of the evening re-packing our suitcases yet again, jettisoning various non-essentials such as half-used bottles of skin care products and a pair of very warm, cosy old slippers, to satisfy the 23kg weight limit. Lights out early, we slept fitfully and woke up at the ghastly hour of 4.30AM, dressed, grabbed our bags and went down to our waiting “coach and four”, the courtesy coach which we had all to ourselves. The very modern new terminal 1 was also similarly bereft of the usual travelling crowds and soon we were close by our departure gate in time to grab coffee/tea/tarte aux pommes/croissant at Brioche Doree for the usual high airport price, none of which bore much resemblance to our recent delightful ‘café culture’ experiences, except for the people-watching component of course. Eleven hours of easy flying later, courtesy of Lufthansa, and we were once more on the last leg home, driving along the 405 towards Long Beach, Belmont Shore and home. It was good to be back to reality and ‘normal’ life once more . . . well for a few months anyway!

So what did we achieve during this epic ‘holiday’??!!

We had an absolutely wonderful six months, we saw so many places, big cities, towns, and villages large and small, countryside wild and rugged and farmland that is in places manicured to perfection, vineyards with rows of pruned vines stretching into the distance reminding me of the lines of gravestones in one of those many sad Great War cemeteries around Ypres, forests where wild boars roam and where we heard the depressing sounds of gunfire from the ‘chasseurs’ in action. We witnessed simplicity in small French country villages where only hippy foreigners choose to live the alternative life-style among the few ancient locals who hang on to their agrarian way of life. We experienced in a small way, the sophisticated lifestyles of the rich and famous in posh Riviera resorts and Victorian seaside spas. In several cities we walked through beautiful old town centres, full of renaissance, neo-classical and medieval architecture. We drove through, but rarely stopped, in small industrial towns squeezed into narrow valleys, packed with high-density housing. We saw sheep on hillsides, cows chewing the cud on mist-covered, rich green meadows, we have befriended and been warmly greeted by donkeys, been followed down country tracks by goats, barked at by village dogs and have stroked cats everywhere. We have met with friendly locals in town and in country, we have learnt how to greet and say our farewells in four different languages. We watched families meeting and gossiping in squares and market places while their children played on their way home from school. We have drooled at views of high snow-capped mountains on the far side of green valleys and been awed by standing on high cliffs, rocky outcrops and even balconies high above sea and ocean, as waves crashed against rocks and beaches far below.

The lives of both town dwellers and village folk have been ours to experience, and we have purchased our necessary groceries at street markets, smart ‘Halles’, hypermarkets, supermarkets, local grocers and specialty ‘Bio’ stores. We drove 11,000 kilometres on autoroutes, cursing the tolls, on beautifully maintained national roads with very little traffic, on nausea-inducing winding roads through the hills, and squeezed through narrow village streets, laid down in the days of carriages, carts and wagons, when ‘high horse-power’ meant at least ‘four-in-hand’. We have seen many places that we would never consider living in permanently, and a few, very few, that have enticed us to get into serious conversations with local ‘immobiliers’. However, we have not yet found anywhere that was simply the ‘most perfect’ location to plant new roots, as to defy due care and diligence, though we did get dangerously close a couple of times! Our shoes have tramped through city streets, along cobbled lanes, up and down ancient stairways and through marketplaces thronging with shoppers hunting out both quality and bargains. We traversed pedestrian crossings on busy main roads, dodging speeding scooters and the occasional mindless driver, but more often than not we have appreciated courteousness behind the wheel. We stopped in cafés to watch, enjoy and participate in the café culture, and also enjoyed too many sweet patisseries as a result. We have people-watched, contemplated our surroundings and happily absorbed the culture we found everywhere.

In so many ways we have tasted, experienced and enjoyed the European way of life, a style of living we both grew up in, in one way or another, and find we have missed in recent years. Whether or not that life proves to be the answer to our dreams, should have become clear once we returned to terra firma across the pond, and to our American life. But, alas, we remain undecided. Of one thing we can be absolutely sure, we will return ‘ere long and once again go free-wheeling along those roads, discovering yet more “views to die for”, visit some more places that I will declare to be “perfect”, and continue the “thrill of the hunt”. And one day, one fine day, we’ll know we have found the right place, where we will both be equally happy to spend the rest of our lives, and we’ll be able to hang up our spurs and riding crop, once and for all. Till then . . . a little side trip to Australia to visit my sister and her family. . . !!

PS I am thankful to Celine’s love of Facebook, something I never thought I’d be saying! The pictures in these last two posts would have been completely lost as a result of our disc-drive debacle but for her diligence in keeping a Facebook journal of our travels.

Cat-sitting in Montpellier.

It was a big wrench leaving Ospedaletti and returning to France again. Something magical there had grabbed both of us and, as we got into our car to drive away, our final memory of our Italian tryst was the beautiful sound of waves crashing against the rocks twenty feet away. So, long before we arrived at our next destination, we were quite convinced that we had to spend more time in La Bella Italia and had already started planning our next trip to Europe!

Alas that was not to be for a while – hopefully in the last quarter of 2018 – and we had to focus our minds on living for three weeks in a stranger’s home, and looking after their beloved cat. Montpellier is a five-hour drive and we arrived there in the early evening darkness, eventually finding a parking space a short walk from the apartment building. We soon discovered that on-street parking is a major problem for Montpellier residents, and the locals were extremely adept at squeezing into the tightest of spaces, using a little gentle bumper contact to assist them as necessary, a technique we approached warily in our lease car!

Tight parking – the driver of the VW had carefully placed some sort of cushion between his rear bumper and the utilities box and then more or less levered his car into the space, leaving his paint on my rear bumper!

We dined well that evening at Bistro Alco, with Kevin our host, while his wife Sheila stayed home finishing off some on-line business before their departure the following morning. Our charge, a black house-cat named Mr.D’Arcy, was not overly excited by our arrival and immediately hid under the bed, quite obviously well aware that his “parents” were departing imminently; animals have an uncanny understanding of the meaning of a pile of suitcases by the front door!

The second floor apartment on rue de Barcelone was only a ten-minute walk from Place de la Comédie and yet, surprisingly quiet, which was a relief for my city-living phobia. With about a third of the city’s population being university students, there was always lots of life centred around the many cafes and bars in the old town. The University of Montpellier, officially established in 1289, is one of the oldest in the world and has been a centre of medical excellence from an even earlier date. The city is, of course, very much more than just a university town, but the atmosphere of studious, intellectual, youthful activity pervades many aspects of the life there and made for an agreeable ambience for this worldly pair of travellers. Which was just as well, as with the problem of parking, we were loath to lose our spot any more than necessary and spent much of our stay on Shanks’ pony, exercising my deteriorating knees to the max, but at the same time getting a good feel of the city-dwelling life. Actually this was quite a good experience, residing as we were in a city with so much to see and appreciate.

So it was back to a life of wandering the streets, seeking culture wherever we could, window shopping mindful of the approach of Christmas, and of course, enjoying French café culture yet again. But having said that, our first attempt to partake of same was a failure. On our second or third day, having finally made friends with Mr D’Arcy, we walked up to Place de la Comedie, thinking we would enjoy a brief late morning coffee and watch the world go by awhile, before taking an afternoon drive to the seaside. But our choice of venue was marred by a waiter who seemed to have no idea of time whatsoever, and after waiting more than fifteen minutes for our order to arrive, our patience frayed and, remembering our midday date with the parking meter, we upped sticks and hot-footed it back to rescue our car from imminent clamping or, worse still, being towed.

The nearest seaside in Montpellier entails a fifteen minute drive to Palavas-les-Flots. However we decided to go a few minutes further to the fishing village of Le Grau-du-Roi, the driver not wishing to stop at La Grande Motte, a purpose-built resort from the sixties, full of concrete apartment buildings, the only redeeming feature of which was the avant-garde architecture.

Avant-garde architecture of La Grande Motte

Le Grau-du-Roi was much more traditional, and hence more to our liking. We walked along the seafront, neatly paved with modern mosaics, braving the brisk wintry breeze raising white caps on the bay, until we came to a touching statue of a mother and her child peering into the distance, searching the horizon for their husband/father’s fishing boat; it was yet another reminder of this coast’s strong traditions with seafaring.

Statue of mother and child in Le-Grau-du-Roi

A canal passes right through the centre of the village, its banks lined with fishing boats, old and new and various pleasure craft and tour boats; tours into the étangs (lagoons) of the nearby Camargue are popular tourist activities, though not such an attractive proposition in early winter. We stopped awhile at one of the cafes lining the quay on the right bank (that’s the bank on your right as you float downstream!), before a late afternoon drive through La Petite Camargue, where we were happy to see some of the famous pink flamingoes.

Another day we drove to Sète, an interesting town built upon and around a hill, Mont St Clair, that was a separate island until the mid-seventeenth century when Louis XIV decreed that the town and port be built to provide an outlet to the sea for the Canal du Midi. This work included reclaiming land between the north-east corner of the island and the mainland, building canals and bridges, and constructing a long isthmus connecting the southwest corner to the land and effectively creating the sea-water lagoon, Étang deThau. The reclaimed land is where most of the town’s industry is found, and the isthmus has nature reserves and vineyards planted in the sand, the wines from which are said to have a distinct flavour of the sea. We spent an hour or more wandering the paths of the small wooded park that covers the peak of the hill, and enjoying the views. Eventually we drove back down into the port area, and looked around the shops before having our usual afternoon coffee break at a café on Quai de la Résistance, overlooking the fishing boats moored either side of the main Royal Canal.

One more trip to the seaside found us making a return visit to the Camargue, on a glorious, sunny, windless autumn day, stopping first to befriend, and feed with fresh green grass from our side of the fence, one of the handsome white horses for which the Camargue is so famous, before arriving at the quiet little low-key tourist village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, where we hoped to find a place to eat a late lunch. In this we were totally thwarted, as everything closes down at 3pm sharp, so we contented ourselves with admiring the impressive old church that had been built to be as much a place of refuge as a house of religion.

From there we drove back through the Petite Camargue in the late afternoon sunshine, towards the splendid, small, medieval walled town of Aigues-Mortes, hoping, in vain sadly, to see some of the powerful Camarguaise black bulls, bred for the corridas in both France and Spain. This drive included taking the ferry across Le Petit Rhone, on a most unusual ferry that is guided by a cable strung across the river upstream from the boat; a simple effective idea as long as the river is always flowing seawards. It wasn’t clear how they handled an incoming tide!

It was getting dark when we arrived at Aigues-Mortes and we restricted our stay to a walk along the main street, Grande Rue Jean-Jaurès, stopping for a much-needed coffee at Café Express on Place St-Louis, and then succumbing to the temptations at La Cure Gourmande, famous for its sugar cookies, a tasty end to an enjoyable day away from the big city.

With Nîmes being slightly less than an hour’s drive from Montpellier, we arranged to meet my step-sister Selina for lunch one day, and unfortunately, chose a very damp rainy day, prompting us to drive straight to Parking de l’Arènes in the centre of town. We did a bit of shopping before the appointed hour, successfully finding Berenice Nîmes, a milliner we had patronised a couple of years earlier and, naturally, we failed to come away empty-handed . . . either of us this time! We had a good lunch at Ciel de Nîmes, personally waited on by the proprietor, one of Selina’s neighbours; the restaurant is located on the rooftop of the fine new library on one side of Place de la Maison Carré, its ultra-modern architecture being an interesting juxtaposition with the wonderfully preserved Roman temple which gives the square its name. On the drive back to Montpellier we stopped off at Sommières, a medieval fortified village, that I had believed could be a good place to live. This time the grey weather made the place seem a little less desirable, and we contented ourselves watching a huge flock of starlings doing their dramatic flying sculptures, catching sight of a couple of rare coypus along the riverbank, and admiring the graceful passage of a small group of swans which included a black one, another comparative rarity.

We returned to Sommières for a second look a few days later, seeing the town under clear blue skies and bright sunshine. As we were crossing the pedestrian causeway across the river, Le Vidourle, a hot-air balloon arrived, seemingly low on gas as it skimmed the treetops seeking a safe place to land. Nice day as it was, the town still seemed rather gloomy, and somewhat limited in what it offered, so we crossed it off our list of nest sites!

Apart from these few sorties to the countryside, we easily filled our time in Montpellier, strolling around that lively, elegant city. Celine’s niece, Martinka, joined us for one weekend and we enjoyed her young company as we discovered more and more new places.

The neo-classic architecture of Antigone.

Antigone is a new neighbourhood built in the early 1980’s, mostly comprising low-income housing (proving that where there’s a socially conscious will, even the less well off in society can live in attractive surroundings) plus public facilities and local shops. Designed by the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill, it is an extraordinary collection of “grand neo-classical structures, enlarging classical motifs such as pediments, entablatures and pilasters to a gigantic scale” [Wikipaedia], and yet complimenting the aging grandeur of much of the town centre.

More classical imagery at the entrance to Le Polygone shopping centre.

It is definitely worth taking a couple of hours to stroll around, ending up at the Polygone shopping centre.

Another morning we chose to join a guided tour around the Faculty of Medicin. As we were the only non-Francophones in the group, the French-speaking guide kindly assured us that he would be happy to describe in English anything that we didn’t understand; but when we tried him out on that a couple of times, his English was far more difficult to understand than his French and we reckoned we would do better to rely on our own translations.

The imposing front door of La Faculté de Médecine.

The main building is very impressive with a lot of history and the portrait gallery of past professors includes such worthies as Francois Rabelais. However, it was Le Musée d’Anatomie that was perhaps the most memorable part of the tour. Glass cabinets lining the walls of the long hall, displayed an extraordinary collection of bits of bodies that have been preserved as exhibits for the students to study, dating back to the days when surgery was still very much the domain of those known affectionately as “sawbones”.

Cases of body parts lined the walls of La Conservatoire d’Anatomie.

And nothing was left to the imagination. Veneral disease was rife among students in the nineteenth century and all those stricken were required to make a very realistic scale model of their affected parts for the educational benefit of their colleagues; thus one fairly large case contained well over sixty scarily detailed models of genitalia in various stages of the diseases, which must surely have frightened many a young man away from the joys of casual sexual encounters! However, the display that particularly interested me was a case of dissected knee joints, making me realise just what I was letting myself in for, having committed to bilateral knee replacement surgery upon our return to California.

Two other places well worthy of a visit in this historic city of learning and culture are the beautiful elegant Opera House and La Musee Farbre. The latter includes in its treasures, a fine collection of Dutch and Flemish masterpieces, as well as various French works of art. The museum was practically deserted apart from us and several security guards who seemed to pop up around every corner. We chatted to one, an Englishman in his sixties who seemed to have a somewhat obscure past; he told us that he liked the work there as there was so little violence in art galleries . . . compared to???! Attached to the museum is L’Hôtel de Cabrières-Sabatier d’Espeyran, a lavish nineteenth century mansion, that gives the visitor a good taste of what life was like for the upper classes in those days.

Preparations for the holiday season were well under way by the end of our stay. The Jardin du Champs de Mars was filled with the little huts that are so much a part of Christmas markets everywhere, “Les Hivernales” as they called it in Montpellier, and we spent a couple of evenings supping gluhwein and consuming hot sausages as we perused the many stalls displaying the usual collection of seasonal offerings. A twenty-foot high, brightly illuminated globe, and giant inflated clowns wandering around, added to the festive atmosphere for the delightfully cosmopolitan crowd of revellers of all ages and from all walks of life, that crowded the square. The city also had its own take on the Festival of Lights, Coeur de Ville en Lumières. A dozen or more of the more significant public buildings were used as the backdrop for a series of excellent audio-video presentations that combined musical scores, both modern rock and classical, with graphics that ingeniously used the architectural details, to tell different stories, some historical and some pure fantasy. Each presentation lasted five minutes or more and they were phased so that we had time to stroll from one to the other; it was very impressive.

And, it seemed, no sooner had we arrived than it was time to move on again. Kevin and Sheila were on their way home and we started our own preparations to hit the road again.

Mr Darcy relaxing with his stuffed animals.

Mr.Darcy had been a very easy feline to sit for; he seemed content in his life as a housebound cat, was clean and tidy, and showed no inclination to follow us out into the great outdoors. As long as we fed him regularly and emptied his litter box, his only slight sign of frustration was a tendency to hump his stuffed animals, which was probably more his daily equivalent of an early morning stretch for us mere humans. And I have to say that, with its large balcony and views over the nearby rooftops towards the rising sun, their compact apartment was actually a very easy place to live. Being so close to such a vibrant city centre, I came to understand what attracts people to live like that. However, it didn’t dissuade me from my need to once more feel the freedom of living life in a smaller community with views of sea or countryside, and I looked forward to our next destination, Calella de Palafrugell in the Costa Brava of Spain . . .

PS Writing this over a year later, I am very conscious that the photos do not always do justice to the subject matter. I have told my Facebook friends earlier about my frustrations at having had a catastrophe with our HDD holding our enormous collection of travel pictures. Luckily we recovered perhaps 80% of the files, but the random way the damage affected them has left me without some of our best images. So, my apologies!

Provence Part Three – Local peregrinations.

After “doing” Saint-Tropez, we felt we should get back to reality and start looking around at the sort of places where we might consider living, which after all was the primary objective of this Grand Tour.

Provence, is quite rightly renowned for it’s wonderful scenery and its profusion of ancient villages perched on hilltops and flowing down hillsides. The department of Var, and particularly the region of Le Dracénois, has more than its fair share of these villages [visit www.tourisme-en-france.com/fr/regions-france/340/le-dracenois for an interactive map of the region].

A local example was Les Arcs-sur-Argens, just a few miles down the road from Lorgues. However, the approach was not very encouraging; the village, actually a town these days, is fairly close to the autoroute and consequently we initially found ourselves in amongst several factories, and some not very attractive, fairly modern, housing developments sprawling down into the valley. We could see the ancient village on the hillside above us and, not really knowing where we were, followed our noses till we found a parking place next to the elegant Eglise du Martyre de Saint-Jean-Baptiste. Looking inside churches is something this irreligious travelling couple does unfailingly in every city, town or village we visit. The art and architecture are what we admire the most, and even this unassuming edifice did not disappoint having some unusual stained-glass windows,

The stained-glass window in Eglise du Martyre de Saint-Jean-Baptiste

and the remnants of quite beautiful wall paintings in the small chapels along each side of the nave. Outside the front door was a fine specimen of France’s ubiquitous plane tree population, spreading its branches across the little car park, as well as a small fountain against the retaining wall with the all-too-common notice “Eau non potable”, a sign of the deteriorating environment in this modern age. The ancient village of Les Arcs, originally named Archos in 1010AD, mainly dates back to the 13^th century and is fortified, so first we needed to find a gateway to get in. A wander along narrow streets in a slightly uphill direction found us at the Clock Tower and our entry into a beautiful medieval environment, meticulously maintained and evidently a chic place to live.

Inside Le Parage, the old centre of Les Arcs-sur-Argens

The old center is oddly called the Parage, a word which in both archaic English and French seems to refer to social rank, family lineage, or feudal land tenure. So it appears it has always been a snobby place to live! All the same it was also a very attractive place to stroll around for those prepared to plod up and down steep, narrow cobbled streets.

La Tour de Taradel and Chapelle Saint-Martin

Our route home took us through the village of Taradeau, on the hill behind and above which is the 12^th century watch tower, La Tour de Taradel. You can’t normally enter either the tower itself or the small Chapelle Saint-Martin next door; but while we were walking around outside, we met a French lady who was trying out the acoustics of the chapel by singing most melodiously through a small open window in the wall, a truly angelic voice in such a peaceful place. We also discovered that from the adjacent car-park, a rough road that provides firefighters access to the wooded hillsides above, was also a designated footpath leading along the side of the ridge back towards Les Arcs; later during our stay in Lorgues, we returned two or three times to take what proved to be one of the loveliest walks we found in Provence, wending alongside vineyards from which we gleaned the odd bunch of dried-out, but very sweet, raisin-like grapes as we passed. We befriended a couple of local ladies who seemed to take this walk regularly in the afternoon sunshine, and whom we bumped into each time we were there.

And the time we took the upward detour to the very top of the small colline, we discovered the Oppidum, the remains of an ancient pre-Roman fortified settlement, in a commanding position with views across the valleys on both sides of the hill. All that is to be seen today are the old walls, which have been slowly revealed by local volunteers clearing the thick brush which had kept the site well hidden over the centuries. There is a wonderful rocky viewpoint nearby, overlooking the valley below, from where one can see all the distant peaks towards the Mediterranean thirty miles away, and below us, the trains on the railway and traffic on the autoroute looking like toys in the distance. On the track on the way up, we found some very soft, red and orange fruits, a bit like little strawberries, fallen from a nearby tree, one of which my trusty taster boldly bit into and proclaimed to be delicious; so we happily ate several handfuls of them. During our descent we came across a friendly local gentleman scrabbling among the brush for plants and, chatting to him as was our wont, we learnt that these tasty fruits were called arbouses . It seems they are not commonly harvested [www.tous-les-fruits.com] although a few weeks later we were offered them when we went to dine with some friends in Languedoc.

. . . and this was the warning that we missed!

Always eager to walk the local trails and footpaths, one day we had an interesting experience on another trail a couple of miles outside of Lorgues, when we found ourselves walking past a line of chasseurs standing at regular intervals beside the track. It seems we had unwittingly marched into the middle of a hunt for wild boars, and these worthies in their camouflage clothing, though also wearing dayglo orange baseball caps (!!?), and armed with powerful hunting rifles, were waiting for their fellow human predators to flush out the boars in our direction. Not wearing bright orange caps ourselves, we deemed it unwise to hang around to chat for long, and can only assume the hunt was successful as we heard the distant sound of several shots as we headed on up the hill through a lovely green forest. We later learnt that the local winegrowers do not take kindly to having wild boars snuffling the ground around their precious vines and are happy to sponsor these gun-toting hunters to eliminate as many as they can. A not altogether happy compromise between the commercial needs of viniculturists and the ideals of environmentalists, it is quite a common occurrence throughout the wilder areas of southern France, as we were to find out later in our travels.

Enjoying the afternoon sunshine in the quiet calm of an out-of-season visit to L’Abbaye du Thoronet

The simple plain architecture of L’Abbaye du Thoronet

Another find in the immediate area was the Abbaye du Thoronet. Built between 1160 and 1230 this beautiful Cistercian abbey, one of three abbeys known as the “Three Sisters of Provence”, came to be restored as a Monument historique in the mid-eighteen hundreds, after it was brought to the attention of the writer Prosper Merrimée who was also the first official inspector of monuments in France. We thoroughly enjoyed the peacefulness of the location in a river valley surrounded by olive groves, as well as the plain, yet precise simplicity of the architecture, which is said to have been the inspiration of many modern architects.

We met a couple from Switzerland and sat on the grass chatting with them for a half hour or more until the afternoon sun settled behind the surrounding hills and the autumnal cool of the evening made us glad to return to the warmth of our car that had been sitting in the sunshine all afternoon. Definitely a place not to be missed, although I suspect the quiet ambience we found so attractive, would be missing in the busy tourist season.

Of course no visit to this part of France can be complete without a stop at at least one wine store. The next afternoon, having had a lazy start to the day, we drove to nearby Flayosc, another pretty little village with a simple small church. On the way back we pulled in to the Sarl Cellier des 3 Collines, tasted two or three of the local wines, and came away with just one bottle of vin rouge, d’huile d’olive, et des herbes de Provence et Gressini! Those few items, along with the wild thyme that Celine, who always kept a keen eye on the ground for the many wild herbs that grow profusely in the area, had picked on our walks, would provide us with a few of the basics for another healthy Provençal style meal.

And so the time arrived to expand our horizons a bit further, a circuitous route to Bargemon and beyond . .

Lyon – part five – City of Silk

During the Renaissance, Lyon became very active in the silk trade and this resulted in the city becoming an important industrial town during the 19^th century. The main silk district is on the steep slopes of Croix Rousse, uphill from our house of learning at L’Inflexyon. We walked up the many steps one evening and at the top found a neighbourhood very different from where we were staying at Les Toits de Lyon; it appeared to be quite working-class and not ‘posh’ at all, as we had thought it might have been, being in such a wonderful location with such great views over the city. We were too late in the day to visit the two or three old silk factories that remain open to the public, so, after a brief wander around, we trotted back down the long wide ‘staircase’ of Montée de la Grande-Côte, and into more familiar territory.

However, we did come across other reminders of the silk-trading past of the city during our wanderings at other times. Several small boutiques in an area close to the Opera, such as La Boutique Ineska, were displaying some simply beautiful diaphanous silk dresses which looked wonderful when modeled by my long-limbed bride; in another gallery we visited, we were able to see the process of silk screen printing that produced the wonderful patterns of those garments; and in a small shop on rue de Boeuf, Brochier Soieries 1890, La Boutique, we received, from the very accommodating proprietor, a fascinating demonstration of a small version of the Jacquard machine, invented in 1801, that automated the weaving of the gorgeous patterns in silk that we associate with furnishing fabrics and the richer materials used in the aristocratic gowns and cloaks of old.

The silk industry is also associated with some of the more unusual features of Lyonnaise architecture. With the older parts of the city being built on and around fairly steep hills, most of the main streets of old Lyon run across the slopes, rather than up and down them. To give people living and working on the upper slopes easier direct access to the river, the famous traboules, a series of arched walkways, underground passages and staircases leading down the slopes, were incorporated into the buildings. Whilst there were lots of these traboules, not that many are nowadays easily accessible to the public, especially the underground tunnels which are now mostly closed off and used for storage.

All the same, we were lucky enough in our choice of learning establishment, to find ourselves directly next-door to a fine example of this style of construction;

Passage Thiaffait starts with stairs down from rue Burdeau and ends up opening onto rue René Leynaud. Several of the really rather elegant staircase traboules can also be seen on and around rue du Boeuf (such as La Tour Rose) and rue Saint-Jean in Vieux Lyon. Although we didn’t pursue our research into traboules any further, we came across several guidebooks and many websites dedicated to the subject [www.lyontraboules.net].

And the connection of traboules with the silk trade was . . . ? They provided safe and efficient passage for silk workers to get their wares to and from market unmarred [www.atlasobscura.com/places/traboules-secret-passages].