Landscape in transition

Our neighbor, Mme. G., says our hamlet is not beautiful. We should have seen it as it was in her girlhood. In 1915 there were 50 families living in the 15 or so houses along the ridge. Until the 1980’s, there was no motorized access to the hamlet. Then the terraces marching down the hillsides were cultivated, onions, potatoes, grapes and chestnuts, when the hamlet was full of beasts, sheep, chickens, goats, dogs and family.

Then it was beautiful, now it is ruined. What generations labored to build is returning to its ur-state, the fields and terraces filling with briars, then with oaks, beech, pine, the walls collapsing and rolling downhill. Chestnuts once carefully grafted, cared for, turning into bristly shrubs and eventually rotting to make room for oaks, pines and beech.

Today Madame is the only permanent original resident. The rest of us are foreigners, be we from Montpellier, Paris or Amsterdam. Another Barbarian invasion, this time tourists and retirees.

Location

The Cevennes are on the Southern end of the Massief Central, an old mountain range just behind the Mediterranean coast, halfway between the Pyrenees and the Alps. The mountains are smaller and more intimate than their younger craggier siblings. We love that they are intimate: while the hills are not high (generally around 700 meters, with Mt. Aigoual at 1500    meters the highest in our vicinity) but steep, the valleys narrow, which makes for a Chinese landscape, ridges rolling from our doorstep to the horizon. 

         

          On the Southern side are the garrigues, calcareous scrubby plains known for vineyards and medieval hamlets, and to the West are the causses, high lime plateaus. Water leeches through the lime, leaving the heights dry and barren. This is an empty landscape swept by icy winds in winter, wild Heathcliffey country, empty for an occasional house sheltering in a hollow and outcrops of volcanic stone in tortured shapes, called “chaos”. The brightness of stars unfiltered by lights, the cold crisp freckling of a myriad stars unfiltered by city lights, the sound only of wind and sometimes a sheep bell.

The Cevennes owe their name to an old word for forested slopes.

The adjacent valley is still of tiers of terraces, long ripples and waves of grown down the hillside, as wrinkled with terraces as an elephants knee.

Summers in the Cevennes are hot and dry. Winters are cool and very rainy. In even a normal year, Mt. Aiguoal catches the rain and pours it into the Herault, the Aveyron, the Arre, the Gardon, etc.   In the fall rain is accompanied by booming thunderstorms.

history

There is a primordial quality to the houses and landscape here. It is no doubt apocryphal, but some say that the first sheep trails (drails de transhumances) were made by the sheep themselves, and that shepherds began to follow, and keep the sheep. Shepherds followed migrating sheep.

The name meant “wooded slopes”, but the trees were gradually logged as first in the Middle Ages to make room for chestnut grooves, then mulberry trees, to raise silkworms. Terraces replaced the trees, culture, terraces, and then in the 18th century the silkworm, brought prosperity and industry, and population. Marie Antoinette no doubt wore silk stockings spun in the Cevennes.

The Cevennes ruggedness and remoteness made them a perfect place for dissidents to hide. So, during the Wars of Religion (which term reminds me of the Southern insistence that the Civil War was not a Civil war but a legitimate war between the States), Huguenots pulled themselves back into the Cevennes. Eventually, with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the Huguenots chose to fight rather than convert. Eventually Louis XIV’s forces managed to subdue them (sending many to their deaths as galley slaves), or to force many to emigrate, some of them even eventually to the United States. The region still has a Protestant majority, and 

I love the cranky Calvinist personality. The lack of castles and aristocracy.

Chestnut and silkworm blights in the 19th century, and cheap Asian labor in the 20th led to successive depopulation, reforestation and reclamation of the land by the original fauna, chiefly beech and chestnut in the higher wetter regions, green oak in the drier parts. Inexorably they are reclaiming their territory.

As it to put a seal on Mme. G’s sorrow, in the early seventies, the French government created the Park National des Cevennes, the largest national park in France. There are still some sheep, but at least as many hikers, a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s       in hand.

Architecture

Except for the occasional town with a 19th century make-over, such as Le Vigan (whose Roman ancestry is hardly credible), the towns are small outposts snaking around a rise, and mas, large farmhouses, boxy structures made either of red shale or at the higher elevations, blocks of granite, walls five feet thick. These are not delicate structures, but rough-hewn blocky structures, on top of vaulted cellars, which were the stables and barns. Most of the real estate was dedicated to farm industries, the vaulted cellars housed sheep, horses and cattle, chestnuts were smoked in cledes, silkworms raised in magnaneries (from magnat, big worm, not big shed as I originally thought. They retain a fortress quality, small windows high up, structures around a common door, cold shoulder to passing roads.

So why do we Love It?

One reason for the Cevennes is the weather: my Dutch sunflower loves the summer heat. And the view.

No castles, just Calvinists eaking out a hardscrabble living.

I love the rolling Waves of peaks receding from our doorstep to the sea. I love the smell of hyssop and thyme, the drone of fat bees in the rosemary blossoms. The zennish cherry tree, purple brown bark and spiky branches, pink clusters of blossom less flush and full than apples, the scrabbly. 

I love the stone work, slabs of granite rebuilt and patched and added onto over the ages, the presence of beast still palpable in the vaulted cellars, donkeys, sheep, horses, an occasional cow. 

I suppose the Cevennes speak to me of a sort of homecoming, the Smokies, my Dad, son of the Plains, falling in love with trees and mountains. The Huguenot past. Some old ancestor Samuel or Benoit, left France by way of England, to reach Virginia to beget children whose number now seem to rival the children of Israel. And the Dutch Calvinism that I love and hate, bluntness, plainness, an insistence on every man’s conscience and choice, even if very clear what they think the choice ought to be. Both tolerant and judgmental, a cranky and kindly character both. And always uncomfortable with self.

I love the relative emptiness

I love the terraces, so tended and built over generations, thousands and thousands of stones carefully plucked and placed, now begin to slide back down the hillside.

Surrounded by the garrigue, Roman roads, vineyards, villages tiny and not much changed, since the middle ages, snail formed medieval around a pimple, curlicue around a fortress or church. The Cevennes, airy, airy silk spinning factories and rough mas, stony granite or schist boxes above vaulted cellars, and terraces, wrinkling the hillside like an elephant’s knee. Old fold mountains unpopulated. Largest national park in France, but little visited except by hikers, inspired by RL Stevenson.

The beauty of the ruggedness, of not being effete, of there being no castles, but sturdy independent thinking Calvinists. Hardworking. Stubborn.

Times change, but I hope to add my mite to what those before me made. Not to transform so much as to adapt the house and the landscape to our needs, without dishonoring those who preceded us.

Parc National des Cevennes and hiking