The auberge at the summit of the Col de Legal, 1231 metres says the signboard, has the largest fireplace that I have ever seen, surpassing even those of our stately tudor palaces. It must have been twelve feet from one side to the other and would have swallowed whole tree trunks; indeed a minor forest fire would be required I would have thought to have enabled the chimney to pull without smoking. But there wasn't a fire yesterday as we sat eating a sandwich of 'jambon du pays' finished greedily with a 'crepe au sucre'.
We had planned to take the route over the Col de Peyrol but long before we got there a helpful indicator board told us it was closed. Probably still by the heavy snow on the volanic peak of Puy Mary and which now lies white and crisp on the high sunlit slopes; though for all I know the cause of the closure could simply have been roadworks. Even on the much lower Col de Legal - the height of Ben Nevis or thereabouts - the last remnants of white winter lay mudded and melting in the gutters of the road.
Cantal's national Volcano Park, as it proudly announces itself, is quite magnificent. The scale of these extinct behemoths towering into the sky from the fertile green valleys below is breathtaking. It's as if the Brecon Beacons of home were a children's model while this was the real thing. From the ridge road you look out as from the window of an aeroplane at the tiny farms so far below. It is both a humbling and an enriching experience.
Yet overwhelmingly it is the emptiness that is eery - the lack of people, the lack of life even. Certainly there is agriculture, but there is little else except tourism and there are not many tourists in March. You could be on the steppes of Asia rather than in the middle of overcrowded, bustling Europe.
We stopped for a morning beer in the town of Salers extolled by the guidebooks as one whose beauty is unsurpassed. The population, said the book, was 410 - small you might have felt for a town with architecture enough to hold ten times that number.
The reason is clear. Every other house has become a restaurant; the whole place is nothing but a tourist honeytrap. The trouble was, as there were no tourists, none of the restaurants were open, nor for that matter was anything else. The place was deserted as if some invading army were imminently expected. For once the old air raid siren on the roof of the Town Hall seemed strictly purposeful.
So we sat in the windy sunshine before a statue of the extravagantly named Tissanier D'Escous, who had restored the town's fortunes 150 years ago. His bronze eyes gaze out over the town's high ramparts to the fertile volcanic plain below. And though every house, every street, every roof, every window is an achingly beautiful architectural gem, I felt most uncomfortable and was glad to scuttle away, the car labouring, onwards and upwards, in the direction of the snow covered peaks.
We returned via Aurillac where we stopped to buy provisions. Today is Sunday; Fennie is on cooking duty. What to cook when all the choice of a French hypermarket is to hand?
I picked out some lovely globe artichokes for starters that we shall eat with melted butter. And then on the fish counter I saw fillets of fresh Nile Perch - something I had never eaten before and so resolved instantly to try it.
But as an insurance (if it's so good why are the Tanzanians selling it to us?) I also bought trout fillets. I shall cook then side by side, maybe with a little white wine in a thin parsley sauce and serve them with a beautifully fresh cauliflower. (I had the idea of preparing this 'au gratin' but suspect this may be overambitious). All will be accompanied by some sautéed potatoes, washed down with some splendid Luberon Rosé and finished with fruit braised in a little mountain honey.
It will be a thank-you to J and B for yesterday's mammoth tour and for my own labours - three hours of clearing the 'Sleeping Beauty' garden at the Mill the day before. Thirty years of brambles and buddleias had taken hold, even an oak sapling, maybe twenty feet tall and as thick as a fencing post shot skywards from the herbaceous border.
Yet the tenacity of nature is amazing, still inside the thickets were iris and daffodils, little lilac primulas and overgrown roses. The garden is but a quarter cleared and already my arms are cut to pieces. But the tonic of sunshine and real fresh air exercise makes everything worthwhile.
Very sadly there is another point to this exercise. The Mill is now for sale. A long story. This may be our last visit.
Saturday 28 April 2007
Monday 23 April 2007
A SPOT OF RAIN? - WELL IT'S BETTER THAN BEING BURNT AT THE STAKE
At last it's rained! It was beginning to feel as though global warming had got its feet well and truly under this end of the planetary table; that the Sahara was moving north as fast as it is moving south. Here in this part of South Wales we can't have seen rain for a month. That's why I am writing about it. I don't know when we'll see the next lot. Even so the garden looks merely dampened, not soaked; should the sun come out we'll soon be back to the half-inch gape between the sides of our great terracotta pots and the soil within.
For we haven't much gardening space. Our garden is what might best be described as 'patio' - or even, in that lovely, picturesque phrase so beloved of estate agents - 'compact and bijou,' though in this case the bijou description might be pushing things a bit, bijou after all meaning 'jewel.' Still, one can but aspire, can one not? And it is only April; the sweet peas are still, metaphorically, in short trousers.
But, unfortunately, the rain has entailed a certain depression of spirits. Instead of seeing from my window vapour trails across a bright blue sky in which a couple of buzzards wheel lazily on the thermals that rise on the valley side, I look out only on a cold greyness, reminiscent of the sea in winter. For the rain naturally brings dampness as well. So I sit here huddled over the laptop wearing a winter polo neck with the desk lights blazing as though it were 4.30 on a winter's afternoon.
Then one might reasonable look forward in expectation to tea and crumpets. But on this spring morning there can be no such anticipation. Instead I have had to resort - indeed have already resorted - to a chemical pick-me up in the shape of a tablet of St John's Wort.
I must say I find these work quite miraculously, transforming a leaden sullen perspective on the day into one of bright and carefree sunshine. Nature's Prosac they are sometimes called. Never having had to resort to proper Prosac, I can't say whether that is an apt description or not. I can only say they work for me - though they don't seem to have any effect on other people - and a few are not supposed to take them at all on account of their doing something or other to the heart, or is it the circulation?
This set me thinking for I often wonder whom it was - 'whom' being obviously a whole army of people down the generations - that discovered the physical properties of plants?
How would you discover, I wonder, that St John's Wort - not a very likely plant one would have thought - had the ability to cheer people up? The sheer impossibility of making such a finding - short of black magic - is demonstrated by our reaction to the humble lettuce, which is supposed to be mildly soporific. The saintly Beatrix Potter no less tells us so in 'The Tale of Peter Rabbit.'
Other, more scientific sources, inform us that lettuce is a source of opiates, though, of course, in minute quantities. Though if you are a rabbit…….? Maybe that is the origin of the phrase happy bunny. Not that rabbits get to eat much lettuce in these parts, at least not the wild ones. And if you are a poor caged rabbit, well, I would think you must need all the stimulation you can get.
But I digress. Though I like lettuce and salads generally I would never have connected lettuce with drowsiness in a thousand years. And if I were looking for a pick-me up I am sure I would have regained and lost, lost and regained my natural spirits ten times over before ever alighting on St John's Wort.
Moreover, this would be before you started with finding the right quantities. Even if were you told which plants did what, you would be unable to treat people without either having no effect whatsoever or, at the other extreme, poisoning them. No wonder then that countrywomen in past times were persecuted for witchcraft.
Which, with my Scottish roots makes me shudder. For nowhere were alleged witches (and it didn't take much alleging) persecuted more insanely than in bonnie (ha!) Scotland. Given my tendency of recommending herbal potions and my habit of addressing myself to animals, whether in my speak or theirs, I fear that I wouldn't have lasted very long at all in those dark sixteenth century days.
Fennie would have been lashed to the stake and fried to a cinder without the option. All of which does make me feel happy to be living in the present and really quite glad that all I have to worry about is a little grey sky.
For we haven't much gardening space. Our garden is what might best be described as 'patio' - or even, in that lovely, picturesque phrase so beloved of estate agents - 'compact and bijou,' though in this case the bijou description might be pushing things a bit, bijou after all meaning 'jewel.' Still, one can but aspire, can one not? And it is only April; the sweet peas are still, metaphorically, in short trousers.
But, unfortunately, the rain has entailed a certain depression of spirits. Instead of seeing from my window vapour trails across a bright blue sky in which a couple of buzzards wheel lazily on the thermals that rise on the valley side, I look out only on a cold greyness, reminiscent of the sea in winter. For the rain naturally brings dampness as well. So I sit here huddled over the laptop wearing a winter polo neck with the desk lights blazing as though it were 4.30 on a winter's afternoon.
Then one might reasonable look forward in expectation to tea and crumpets. But on this spring morning there can be no such anticipation. Instead I have had to resort - indeed have already resorted - to a chemical pick-me up in the shape of a tablet of St John's Wort.
I must say I find these work quite miraculously, transforming a leaden sullen perspective on the day into one of bright and carefree sunshine. Nature's Prosac they are sometimes called. Never having had to resort to proper Prosac, I can't say whether that is an apt description or not. I can only say they work for me - though they don't seem to have any effect on other people - and a few are not supposed to take them at all on account of their doing something or other to the heart, or is it the circulation?
This set me thinking for I often wonder whom it was - 'whom' being obviously a whole army of people down the generations - that discovered the physical properties of plants?
How would you discover, I wonder, that St John's Wort - not a very likely plant one would have thought - had the ability to cheer people up? The sheer impossibility of making such a finding - short of black magic - is demonstrated by our reaction to the humble lettuce, which is supposed to be mildly soporific. The saintly Beatrix Potter no less tells us so in 'The Tale of Peter Rabbit.'
Other, more scientific sources, inform us that lettuce is a source of opiates, though, of course, in minute quantities. Though if you are a rabbit…….? Maybe that is the origin of the phrase happy bunny. Not that rabbits get to eat much lettuce in these parts, at least not the wild ones. And if you are a poor caged rabbit, well, I would think you must need all the stimulation you can get.
But I digress. Though I like lettuce and salads generally I would never have connected lettuce with drowsiness in a thousand years. And if I were looking for a pick-me up I am sure I would have regained and lost, lost and regained my natural spirits ten times over before ever alighting on St John's Wort.
Moreover, this would be before you started with finding the right quantities. Even if were you told which plants did what, you would be unable to treat people without either having no effect whatsoever or, at the other extreme, poisoning them. No wonder then that countrywomen in past times were persecuted for witchcraft.
Which, with my Scottish roots makes me shudder. For nowhere were alleged witches (and it didn't take much alleging) persecuted more insanely than in bonnie (ha!) Scotland. Given my tendency of recommending herbal potions and my habit of addressing myself to animals, whether in my speak or theirs, I fear that I wouldn't have lasted very long at all in those dark sixteenth century days.
Fennie would have been lashed to the stake and fried to a cinder without the option. All of which does make me feel happy to be living in the present and really quite glad that all I have to worry about is a little grey sky.
Saturday 14 April 2007
Songs From the Auverne (1)
The feisty and erudite Jane Shilling who writes an elegantly crafted column every Friday in Times2, claimed the other day to ricochet out of bed each morning at 5.30am. That is not a word that could possibly be applied to me, I thought, as the alarm went off at the same barbaricly early hour. I like my bed, for all sorts of reasons, I have my best thoughts there and it is my favourite place for scribbling; I am always reluctant to leave it at any time.
Yet today the ricocheting thought is appropriate for we face a mad dash across England to Stansted and the plane to France. Nevertheless, as first one foot meets the floor and then the other I feel like some hibernating beetle awaken in the depths of winter - able to move only at a speed that would have a lazy sloth gauping with admiration.
I flounder downstairs for a restorative cup of tea and in true Scots tradition make the porridge to get us going. Then, cases piled into the car, I drive out on to the road and head for the sun, just breaking in the East, praying that today is not the day that a hay lorry catches fire on the M4 as it did last week, with calamitous results for anyone with a deadline.
But Fate is kind. We arrive ridiculously early and in a few hours alight deep in 'La France Profonde' - a tiny regional airport where even the 'douanier' smiles at you - a marked contrast to the press and surliness of Stansted. Our friends J and B wait to welcome us and we drive off in the sunshine.
The air is softer here, I reflect, the light more luminous, the temperature warmer. The poplar trees are heavy with mistletoe, the almonds in full blossom. Yellow forsythia abounds with the occasional pinky-red japonica just open.
The country here is very like mid-Wales, but on a grander scale. The hills are higher, the valleys longer, the rivers - our route took us alongside the Lot - broader. It has been similarly abandoned by its inhabitants with farming and tourism the only remaining economic lifestays.
We stop somewhere for a beer, sit in the sunshine, catch up on the news. I notice two buzzards over head. A dungareed man walks past smoking, a little round head on which sits a disproportionate nose, fleshy and hooked, so that he resembles a kind of parrot. Yet again I regretted my inability to draw, to capture in a few squiggly lines the essence of that typically eccentric face.
We arrive at the village and descend the steep road down to the Mill, granted its first licence more than two hundred years ago. Fifty acres of field and forest and disused buildings, full of machinery left as it was when work finished some fifty years ago. I hear again the rush and rustle of the millstream, see the calm of the millpond, cleaner and clearer than when we were last here in the autumn.
I walk with J up the old unmetalled road that climbs steeply up the valley. Who built it, I wonder, and why? It seems impassable to anything less powerful than a 4 x 4, yet, I supposed, at one time horses must have climbed it with carts behind them. Collecting timber in the woods and bringing in supplies to the Mill nestling below us, surrounded by walnut trees.
The Mill house has long been modernised and back there I join B in the kitchen as she prepares supper. Our conversation is always eclectic. Tonight we find ourselves discussing liberty bodices and by what supernatural mechanism do pillow cases always end up inside duvet covers when you wash them in a machine.
I go outside. Though we live at home in what the government defines as 'a rural area' it is so easy to forget what real countryside is like. Where the only sound you hear is natural, the rushing water, the tweet of birdsong, the gentle swaying of branches in the wind or the bark of an animal. Where there is no light outside apart from the sun or the stars and where in the night you cannot see your hand in front of your face.
An early bat wheels in the gathering darkness. I am beginning to feel tired. More tales from the Mill very soon.
Posted by Fennie Somerville
(This blog appeared first on the Country Living website www.countryliving.co.uk)
Yet today the ricocheting thought is appropriate for we face a mad dash across England to Stansted and the plane to France. Nevertheless, as first one foot meets the floor and then the other I feel like some hibernating beetle awaken in the depths of winter - able to move only at a speed that would have a lazy sloth gauping with admiration.
I flounder downstairs for a restorative cup of tea and in true Scots tradition make the porridge to get us going. Then, cases piled into the car, I drive out on to the road and head for the sun, just breaking in the East, praying that today is not the day that a hay lorry catches fire on the M4 as it did last week, with calamitous results for anyone with a deadline.
But Fate is kind. We arrive ridiculously early and in a few hours alight deep in 'La France Profonde' - a tiny regional airport where even the 'douanier' smiles at you - a marked contrast to the press and surliness of Stansted. Our friends J and B wait to welcome us and we drive off in the sunshine.
The air is softer here, I reflect, the light more luminous, the temperature warmer. The poplar trees are heavy with mistletoe, the almonds in full blossom. Yellow forsythia abounds with the occasional pinky-red japonica just open.
The country here is very like mid-Wales, but on a grander scale. The hills are higher, the valleys longer, the rivers - our route took us alongside the Lot - broader. It has been similarly abandoned by its inhabitants with farming and tourism the only remaining economic lifestays.
We stop somewhere for a beer, sit in the sunshine, catch up on the news. I notice two buzzards over head. A dungareed man walks past smoking, a little round head on which sits a disproportionate nose, fleshy and hooked, so that he resembles a kind of parrot. Yet again I regretted my inability to draw, to capture in a few squiggly lines the essence of that typically eccentric face.
We arrive at the village and descend the steep road down to the Mill, granted its first licence more than two hundred years ago. Fifty acres of field and forest and disused buildings, full of machinery left as it was when work finished some fifty years ago. I hear again the rush and rustle of the millstream, see the calm of the millpond, cleaner and clearer than when we were last here in the autumn.
I walk with J up the old unmetalled road that climbs steeply up the valley. Who built it, I wonder, and why? It seems impassable to anything less powerful than a 4 x 4, yet, I supposed, at one time horses must have climbed it with carts behind them. Collecting timber in the woods and bringing in supplies to the Mill nestling below us, surrounded by walnut trees.
The Mill house has long been modernised and back there I join B in the kitchen as she prepares supper. Our conversation is always eclectic. Tonight we find ourselves discussing liberty bodices and by what supernatural mechanism do pillow cases always end up inside duvet covers when you wash them in a machine.
I go outside. Though we live at home in what the government defines as 'a rural area' it is so easy to forget what real countryside is like. Where the only sound you hear is natural, the rushing water, the tweet of birdsong, the gentle swaying of branches in the wind or the bark of an animal. Where there is no light outside apart from the sun or the stars and where in the night you cannot see your hand in front of your face.
An early bat wheels in the gathering darkness. I am beginning to feel tired. More tales from the Mill very soon.
Posted by Fennie Somerville
(This blog appeared first on the Country Living website www.countryliving.co.uk)
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