|
High on the hills of the forest of the Dead Writers, the pines, the Douglas firs and the oak trees are swaying in the wind. The air is fresh and cool as a glass of iced water. Here French writers killed in active service in the 1st and 2nd World Wars are commemorated. Only the French would have the imagination to name a piece of woodland after dead fighting writers. You can fly down the Allée Antoine Saint-Exupéry, walk around the Rond-point Charles Péguy, and roar down the Chemin Jacques Lion. Many of the names are obscure; others are illegible, forgotten names even if you could decipher them. More than sixty out of a total of 560 dead writers are commemorated, including Ernest Psichari, author of L’Appel des Armes in 1913. He should have been more careful about what he wished for: he got the war he wanted, but was killed in the trenches in 1914.
As the wind strengthens and the pine trees bend, I wonder what would happen if a branch were to break off and land on my head. Would my death be treated as missing in combat? How nice it would be to have my own avenue of trees, something particularly English perhaps, beech trees or elms, although how well they would fare in this rude climate is hard to know.
I am up here flying like a kite in the wind because I have resolved to discover something of the High Languedoc. I have spent five years looking at the hills from my terrace, watching them turn blue in the evenings, white occasionally with snow, and pink sometimes at sunset. I have made various sorties, bike rides, canoe trips down the rivers, picnics in the chestnut trees. But I don’t feel I know the place at all. It doesn’t give up its secrets lightly. Traditionally it has been a place to hide from religious oppression, the taxman and first wives.
I discuss the area with one of my French friends with whom I had shared a number of adventures in a previous book.
“What do the people of the plains think of the High Languedoc?”
“Nothing.”
“Do they ever go there?”
“Never.”
Would you like to come up with me and look around?”
“No.”
They call it Haut-Languedoc, the Haut-Cantons or worse, the Arrière Pays, the back country. One of its better nicknames is “Château d’Eau”, that rather lovely French phrase for a water tower. The High Languedoc is where the rain falls, the rivers run, and underground channels bring water and life to the plains below. Without it, the cities and fields by the coast would be sun-baked and dry as a desert. It is less than an hour’s drive to the Mediterranean Sea, but it is a world away. It’s the last gasp of the Massif Central, a geological wonder of granite rocks, limestone plateaux called causses, trees, meadows, and small villages.
If the inhabitants of the plain think of it all, it is as a dark place, where bad things happen. There was the baker whose husband died there while on a fishing trip. Fishing does not strike me as one of the more dangerous sports, but apparently he fell down a crevasse. He wasn’t found until days later, by which time he had starved to death. He had lain there for a long time, thinking of the one that got away.
I began asking people about it. “Very cold,” one person told me. “I knew a painter up there who he nearly froze to death one winter. He spent the time painting pictures of furnaces in an attempt to keep warm.”
“Beautiful landscape,” said another. “So grand it makes the Lake District look like Hyde Park.”
“Very ugly people,” I was told by a writer who lives for most of the year in Venice. “When I stayed up there the butcher’s wife was so hideous I was forced to live off lentils for a month.”
The High Languedoc runs along the top of the departéments of the Aude, the Gard and the Hérault. Looking at a map, you are struck by the lack of towns or even villages. Instead there are large hills, almost mountains, but nothing much more than 1,000 metres high. People either live clinging to the hillside or cluster along the river valleys, where the land is fertile and the rain is softer.
Hidden among these hills are places of worship; it seems there is something about altitude that gets people thinking about god. There’s a complete mixture of different faiths: Europe’s largest Buddhist retreat, which both the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere have visited, is in Roqueredonde, near Lodève and the A75 motorway that goes from Pézenas to Paris. The Buddhists spent ten years searching all over Europe until announcing that this was the perfect site. Apparently it’s all to do with magnetism.
Then there are catholic monasteries, one of which at Joncels was taken over by villagers after the Revolution, and where people still live. It is strange to see geraniums growing in the cloisters and washing hanging from the sacristy. How much stranger it must have seemed in 1800; almost blasphemous. Even less accessible, the Abbaye de Sylvanes is a place where you can still hear the music of the Middle Ages. There are also Protestant Churches, for this area was full of heretics. There may still be pockets of Cathars lurking among the trees. There is even a Russian Orthodox Church, built in the unorthodox manner of sawn timber held together without nails.
Over the years, there have been a number of industries in the High Languedoc. Some of them continue, some have left buildings and memories, while others have virtually vanished without trace. For example, St-Gervais-sur-Mare, a small town hidden between two mountain ranges, was once home to a booming industry that produced chestnut hoops for wine barrels. All the slopes around St-Gervais were covered in chestnut coppicing. The traditional method of bending these hoops was to wet them, heat them, and then bend them over one’s knee. But an enterprising St Gervaisian, name unknown, invented a small machine that bent the hoops as well as any knee, and much more quickly. The hoops were used for the barrels of wine and brandy that were shipped from Sète to London and Amsterdam.
In another valley they cultivated silkworms. There are remnants of this industry in Ganges, where you can still buy silk stockings. At Graissesac there are coal mines, abandoned since the 1970s. There was gold-mining in the hills, uranium exploration, and there are still quarries where you can buy marble and stone. This was the scene of much of the resistance to the Germans. There are graves and memorials to dead soldiers, German, French and British. There are strange creatures, wild boar and sheep, eagles, kites and woodpeckers. There are dolmens erected by prehistoric man. But maybe all I will find is Dutchmen picking magic mushrooms.
I thought I would walk from the Foret des Anciens Combatants Ecrivains west, towards Douch, over the Caroux and the Espinouse, and on towards Castres. There are traces of the Santiago da Compostela trail here, that red herring that propelled pilgrims from all over Europe to Galicia. I went to Santiago. It was during Holy Year, what they call Xacobeo, which only occurs when St James’s Day falls on a Sunday. I thought it was a dreary place, with an ugly cathedral. I was glad I hadn’t walked across Europe to see it. I wanted to put my hand in the column where thousands of hands over hundreds of years have created a hollow, but the cathedral guards would not allow it. Maybe I will bump into some pilgrims in the woods, and tell them not to bother.
Much of where I plan to go has been turned into a park. It was created in 1972 and covers parts of the Montagnes Noires, the Monts de l’Espinouse, the hills of Caroux and the Somail, the Sidobre and parts of the Monts de Lacaune. The aim was to preserve the flora and fauna of the region. It is a smaller, younger version of the Cevennes park.
There are a few other reasons for wanting to make the walk. It had been a long summer, with children and guests coming and going. Too many parties, too much wine, much music and laughter and dancing on tables. But there had been very little solitude. I wanted to walk among the trees, jump over rivers, and sleep in the open. I wanted to wake up and not know what I was doing or where I was going. I wanted to be on the hills alone at that time of day that the French call ‘entre chien and loup’ when the light is fading and people are beginning to hurry home, the time of day that Shakespeare describes in Macbeth when “Light thickens; and the crow makes wing to th’rooky wood;” I didn’t want anybody telling me what to do, or asking me for things. I wanted to walk and breathe, stop when I wanted and eat a little food and wine of the region. Most of all I wanted to get lost.
The Buddhists say that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. No doubt this is true, but I found myself putting off that first pace. There was the question of what to take. I knew I didn’t need too much stuff. When Robert Louis Stevenson saddled up a donkey a hundred years or so earlier in the Cevennes, it may have provided him with a comic prop, but it also gave him endless trouble. His happiest moment is not admiring the view near Cassagnas, nor the beautiful arms of the married lady he shares a room with. No, it is the gift he receives from the innkeeper of Bouchet St. Nicholas:
“Blessed be the man who invented goads! Blessed the innkeeper of Bouchet St. Nicholas, who introduced me to their use.”
It’s amazing that the RSPCA hasn’t had the book banned for encouraging the whipping of donkeys. But I knew from experience that the best way to travel is alone. But would there be lodging on the way, or would I sleep under a tree with a bottle of brandy in one hand and a gun in the other like Stevenson?
I liked the idea of the adventure, but it was taking a while to start. I began to look for books on the subject; I had no idea that walking had inspired such a large literature. There is Walking by Henry David Thoreau, who you will recall was America’s pioneering naturalist, who lived for a year by Walden Pond, but took his washing home to his mum. He was all for the preservation of the wilderness. The opening lines are: “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a free and culture merely civil-to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.” Fine sentiments, but I am more tempted to buy the splendidly titled Walking: A fine art, as practised by naturalists and explained by original contributions to this volume, and by quotations from the published works of those who love to dally along country lanes (Unknown Binding) by Edward Fuller Bigelow, 1907. For some inexplicable reason the book is out of print.
Is there more to walking than I imagined? I remember the Latin phrase ‘Solvitur Ambulando’, you can solve it by walking. I think it’s good to move and walk, but when you come back the washing up still needs doing, the babies need bathing and the taxes need paying. Maybe next time the French authorities come knocking I shall just leave a sign: Gone Walking. That will see them off.
By now the last day of summer have passed. The leaves will start turning on the trees, and the days and nights will grow cooler. There is snow in the High Languedoc. If I don’t leave soon I will have to wait until next year. So I pack a small rucksack with a change of clothes, a compass, a bobble hat, a toothbrush, a water bottle, a Laguiole knife, a bird-book and a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
There is no more delay to be gained. I get a lift to Lamalou-Les-Bains, a spa town at the foot of the Espinouse. It was terribly fashionable in the 19th century. Politicians and writers such as André Gide and Alphonse Daudet came to take the cure. There are a number of large rococco houses and a pink casino. It is where the military sends its sick soldiers to convalesce. It is may be a curious place to start a walk, given that half the population is in a wheelchair.
My desire to get lost is tempered with the realization that I want to get somewhere. So I have decided – at the beginning at least – to follow the Grand Randonnée 7. The existence of such a well-marked, well-trodden route seems to embody all the contradictory natures of the French nation. They will fight for freedom, but they expect the state to look after them. Daily life is strictly controlled, but everybody drives like a lunatic. They want to experience nature, but they do so along a well signposted route. To let you know you are going in the right direction somebody has come along with paint and a stencil and sprayed small white and red marks on rocks and trees. It is like the work of a homesick Polish graffiti artist. At first it seems absurd, almost an imposition. But after a while, particularly when you are puzzling over a choice of three different routes, its presence is consoling.
 The path from Lamalou starts in a pine-scented forest. I can hear the bells of the church chiming midday. Instead of a call to arms, it’s a call to lunch. But I plan to picnic in the forest. For the first hour or so it seems to be constant climbing. There is a shiny stone path, bright as a mackerel. The pines give way to chestnut trees, with prickly burrs containing nuts that are beginning to open and fall. The chestnut tree must have the most elegant of leaves, elongated and transparent as a pianist’s fingers.
I cross a road, find my Polish flag next to a stone cross, and walk along a shaded path towards Torteillan. There was once a Roman villa here, but now it’s a small hamlet. There is a beautiful fig tree, from which I steal a couple of figs. They are green and delicious. I pass a couple picking up their post from a collection point and wishing each other ‘Bon Appetit!’, then I disappear back into the trees. The route winds and climbs until Combes, a small village with a stone church. There is no sign of life except the sound of a couple of chickens.
From here it is back among the chestnut trees and the bracken. The path is at times wide and elegant like the staircase in a stately home. Then it narrows so you can hardly squeeze between the dry stone walls and the trees. After two-and-half hours walking I have not passed another person, save the couple eager for lunch in Torteillan.
Finally I reach the Foret des Anciens Ecrivains Combattants. There are a number of picnic tables near the Rond-point Charles Peguy. I eat my lunch of paté, jambonneau – a magical pig dish in a pot that looks hideous but tastes heavenly – some bread, some grapes and a piece of chocolate. I have no wine, but a bottle of water. I also have a booklet that the tourism office has given me in Lamalou, so I read about the history of the forest.
It was conceived in 1931, a year after torrential rain had caused mudslides and deaths in the valleys below. Its aim was to be both practical and symbolic. It would help limit further mudslides and perhaps encourage other landowners to replant trees. It would also honour the writers who gave their lives for France in the Great War. The association of Ecrivains-Combattants joined forces with the Touring Club de France and acquired ten hectares. A market gardener, M. Paray-le-Monial, donated ten thousand cedar trees. At one time the whole of the landscape would have been wooded, but generations had cleared the land for farming. It is not particularly good farming land, but they were able to scratch a living out of chestnuts, sheep and perhaps some cattle. The communes of Combes and Rosis were at first reluctant to expand the forest because they did not want to lose any grazing land, but eventually they gave in. As well as cedars, there are Corsican pines, Nordmann pines and Red American oaks. Many of these were planted in 1983, after a terrific fire ravaged more than a quarter of the forest. No more cedars were planted, because they were not thriving in the environment. As a symbol of forest regeneration, it seems to have been a success. Elsewhere in the hills replanting took place, although perhaps there is still too much pine, which always give the landscape a rather gloomy Nordic air.
It is always tough to get going again after lunch. The temptation is to stretch out on the picnic table and have a siesta. If those dead fighting writers were generous blokes, they would have arranged for a couple of hammocks in the trees. I will have to send a message of complaint to the estate of Saint-Exupéry. The Little Prince still sells strongly and those royalties could be put to good use. Perhaps a fridge full of fine wine could be provided also, along with a dustbin to throw the rubbish.
The wind has died. It is warm and humid. The rucksack, although emptied of food, is heavier. Eventually I stumble out of the trees and into a landscape of wild rocks and heather.
Half an hour later there is the sound of running water. I descend a boulder strewn path, cross a little river, and climb into the hamlet of Madale. It is beautifully made, constructed out of the stone from the hills. Even some of the roofs are made of lauzes – rather like slates, but heavier. The buildings have to be very strong and well-made to withstand the weight of the roof. There is a red-haired woman looking out of the window, who ducks behind a curtain when I look up. The severed front legs of sixteen wild boar have been hammered onto her front door. This is not a place to tarry.
One of the things this path does not do is take me anywhere near a view of the Mediterranean Sea. It is as if it wants to convince me that we are miles away, and not just an hour’s drive from the beach. The path skirts round the north side of a hill, then climbs up an interminable escarpment. Finally up on a plateau, I look the heather, the scraggly trees and can think of only one landscape to compare it to: Ashdown Forest in Sussex. Any minute now and I’ll run into Winnie-the-Pooh.
There is a marshy stretch of ground to cross called the ‘tourbière de la Lande’. The authorities have kindly constructed a wooden walkway across it and painted panels tell us of the sort of creatures that live here. Apparently there is a carnivorous plant called a droséra and a lizard that lives in water. I am exhorted also to look out for mouflons, chevreiuls, which are small deer; and birds of prey. I see no sign of life of any kind.
At last I come across a sign leading me to an orientation table. Here, back in 1933, on the edge of the Caroux overlooking the low Languedoc, the Touring Club de France erected a small terrace. There is a metal barrier to stop you being pitched to your death and a marvellous porcelain map, lined with age like a famous beauty but still elegant, that describes the landscape laid out below. The poet Wallace Stevens, wrote that:“Panoramas are not what they used to be.”
He should be dug up, propped against the railings, and forced to feast his sockets on the view. He would see a mass of wild rocks, chestnut and pine trees, and then a ring of hills falling away, gradually diminishing and levelling into a plain until away in the distance you can make out a silver sliver of sea. Directly below, the Orb river, wending its way to Béziers and beyond to the coast; due south, Narbonne, the Roman’s first colony outside Italy; to the east, Mont Ventoux, 195 kilometres away, and rarely visible, and to the west, Castres, where I am heading. Below are shops and civilization, barking dogs and crying children. Up here there is nothing but the sound of the wind.
From here it is a short stroll down the hill to Douch, where I hope to find dinner and a bed for the night. As I come down through a small stand of beech trees – so perhaps it would be possible to grow a beech memorial after all – I suddenly see a rash of hikers descending on the small hamlet. I’d better be quick or I’ll be sleeping in the trees.
|
