Today we visited Benac, one of those small and almost picture-postcard-pretty villages outside Foix. I think it’s unlikely that too many horny-handed sons and daughters of toil live there these days. Too many freshly painted facades and cheery boxes of geraniums at the windows. Too many sleek and highly-polished cars.
But once upon a time it was a busy working community. For the last few years, every summer the villagers here and in nearby hamlets arrange carefully constructed and dressed figures into appropriate corners of both village and countryside. These figures celebrate the way of life that persisted here – and throughout France – for centuries, and only died out some time after the First World War. They call the paths you follow to hunt out all these scenes Le Cami des Encantats: Occitan for something like the Enchanted Pathways. Come with me and take a look.
Welcome to le Cami des Encantats. Here’s the Garde Champêtre, paid by local farmers to keep local crops and stock safely in one place.
This is a World War 1 poilu (soldier), looking dazed but surprisingly clean after months in the trenches.
A wedding. Always above all a civil ceremony here in France, the mayor is wearing his ceremonial sash.
Retired at last. Why not watch the world go by in the village square?
…. though there’s usually baby-minding to be done as well.
Pudding basin haircuts weren’t just for English children
Then as now, the Tour de France, complete with the wearer of the maillot jaune, might go through the village
Baron Cyprien-Emmanuel-Marie de Bellissen-Bénac. The lord of the manor I think
A colporteur: a hawker, purveyor of books and other good things.
The beekeeper.
The mobile distillery or alambic came round every autumn to distill some of the fruit crops into potent alcohol. It still happens.
As in England, the pig played an important part in keeping the household nourished through the winter months.
An important craftsman: the nail-maker
This man’s work is indoors. He’s at the forge.
The miller.
A woman at the village lavoir, or clothes washing place. Sinks are fed from a natural water source and sheltered by a roof. One of the centres of village life.
Haymaking
Log sawing: always important in this wooded region.
Now the French hunt for pleasure: then it was more sheer necessity.
The postman.
Le pelharot: the rag and bone man.
L’estamarron: the tinker dips worn cutlery to bring it back to life
At the Romanesque church, the bellringer calls the people to worship.
And here’s the priest arriving.
If you work in the fields all day you need water. This young woman brings it to you.
This shepherd will spend the whole summer at high mountain pasture with his sheep.
This woman’s a seed sower.
And he’s preparing the soil for her.
Autumn. This young girl’s off to look for chestnuts and mushrooms to dry and store for winter.
Saturday morning dawned damp and misty. This was fine by the 100 or so walkers who gathered bright and early in Lavelanet for the annual Marche du Tisserand. The walk, organised by the town’s Musée du Textile, celebrates the ancient ‘chemin pavé’ used by the cloth workers who lived in Montségur and walked this path to bring their produce down to Lavelanet to be sold. Saturday’s walk, the 27th, was for fun, and nobody would have had more than a light rucksack to carry. The full three hour trek (6 hours both ways of course), steep and stony at times, when laden with goods to sell one way and perhaps provisions for the household the other must have been a slightly different matter.
This time too, there were goodies at the top for the walkers as they finished their ascent. The mayor of Montségur was there with an aperitif for everyone, and we at Découverte de Terres Lointaines were there too, with a mediaeval picnic we’d been preparing .
Who knew chopping coriander could be such fun?
The cooking took several days, but the research, with the help of the Museum at Montségur, took weeks of researching, testing, tasting, rejecting, trying again… Still, eating’s always fun
Though curious, the walkers were suspicious too. What would a mediaeval picnic be like? Heavy, probably, with mountains of flatulence-inducing beans. Tasteless too maybe.
What a surprise then. Here’s the menu:
Spinach tart with lardons: we could have used nettles or any of a whole range of herbs, but settled on the more widely available vegetable option.
Poichichade: this herby chick pea paté, which we served on hunks of organic wholemeal bread, is a close cousin of hummus, but without the tahini. It went down well.
Broussade: star of the show! A very tasty mix of smoked fish and curd cheeses. This really is one for anybody’s dinner table. Simple too. Recipe below.
Pets de nonne: basically deep fried choux pastry, puffy and light. Here’s the story. Back in the Middle Ages, the bishop of Tours was visiting the Abbey of Marmoutiers to bless a relic. Whilst preparing a meal in his honour, a novice let fly an unfortunate noise of the kind familiar to those of us who’ve eaten far too many beans. To cover her embarrassment, she busied herself dropping the choux paste she’d been making into some handy cooking oil so that it sizzled loudly. The pets de nonne were born.
Fromentée sucrée: cracked wheat cooked with milk and honey. If you like rice pudding, you’d like this too
Gâteau de fruits secs: a rich and heavily fruited pain d’epices style cake.
Just before the walkers arrived: The picnic on its thoroughly modern paper plates.
The congratulations when they came – and they came in quantity – were tinted with some astonishment: ‘It was so good. We never expected it to be so tasty! Well done’.
But after eating, drinking and lots of talking, it was time to dance. Zingazanga had been playing loudly throughout the meal, but they turned their attention to teaching us simple steps and dances from centuries ago. Even I with my two left feet joined in.
Let the dancing begin
Broussade
Ingredients • A quantity of as many varieties of smoked fish as you can decently lay your hands on: we used smoked salmon, herring and haddock. • A more-or less equal quantity of brousse. This is a curd cheese made from the milk of sheep, goats or cows. A mixture would be ideal, and failing that, any soft curd cheese.
Broussade in the making
• Paprika • Chopped dill • Seasoning.
Process half the fish coarsely, and finely chop the rest. Mix with the other ingredients. That’s all. Enjoy with some good bread and a probably thoroughly un-mediaeval green salad.
The Tour de France 2012 hit Laroque on the Limoux – Foix stage on Sunday 15th July. It was a long day…. and that was just for the supporters.
The day before, passing through Quillan, we passed whole communities of camper vans holed up in prime spots for watching the race.
Unlike the Ariègeoise a fortnight before, there were plenty of signs to stop the poor old riders going wrong
And here at Laroque, we had our own rules and regulations to keep the event running smoothly.
Team UK (Laroque branch) prepare a poster to support the British competitors.
And here’s Brian, chalking all the Brit names across the route. He got a huge cheer from French spectators the whole way down the street. There are more of them than seems likely from this shot.
The pre-Tour caravane begins. They’re selling official merchandise. Everything that follows is free.
But while it was still pretty quiet, we had ‘a nice cup of English tea’ with neighbour Aisha
The LCL float, distributing baseball caps.
The Haribo float. Sarah caught a tiny bag of sweets flung in her general direction.
The Belin Box
Banette. They produce flour for local bakers.
You can have a flutter on the races at a PMU bar. Here’s their float.
Sarah gets a cocktail sausage
Free madeleines when the St. Michel float passed. Not Worth Getting Fat For.
No free tyres when the Kleber float passed
Almost over….. the Nesquick float.
The haul we found we had after everything had passed by, mainly destined as souvenirs for friends in England…. lucky people.
The first riders pass. Sue can identify almost all of them.
Bradley Wiggins passes our front door. No time to stop.
Team support.
Yet more riders…. known to Sue.
With the riders long past, all that’s left are support vehicles, official cars, medical support, press, gendarmes……..
Thanks Sue, thanks Tom for the use of all your photos.
La Boulangerie Fonquernie at Laroque prepares for the arrival of the Tour de France
We have a few of the family here staying with us. They claim that they want to see us. They’ve mentioned walking in and near the mountains. They certainly want good food and wine – lots of it – whether here at home or in one of the restaurants in the patch.
Really though, they’ve chosen this weekend with some care. It’s the one when the Tour de France whizzes past our house.
Today then has been a day of careful research in advance of Sunday’s ‘fly past’. There was a planning meeting at a nearby restaurant, ‘La Maison’, over copious and varied hors d’oeuvres, blanquette d’agneau and bavarois de framboises to decide what we should choose as our vantage point for the action.
We’ll have the planning meeting after we’ve got outside this little lot
Then there was the walk. This followed the Voie Verte between us and la Bastide sur l’Hers, and closely hugs the route the cyclists will take; and the ridge path between la Bastide and home, which peers down over the same road. Where to choose to watch?
We’d thought of the land occupied by the old station. A film crew has moved in for the duration. We considered looking up towards the race from the old railway line itself. Too far away.
And the ridge, which we’d thought the perfect answer, turns out not to be. Certainly we could see many hundreds of metres of road at once, but at a distance that means that we’d be doing no better than sitting at home in front of the TV.
We’ve decided against watching from here.
In the end, we’ll be staying put. We want to see the riders close up, smell the sweat, and absorb the atmosphere. There are still decisions to be made. Upstairs in one of the bedrooms? If so, which one? Downstairs on the street, where we’ll be nearer still?
Shall we ham it up and decorate the house in Union flags, and hang banners reading ‘Go Wiggins’ out of the window? So many decisions, so little time.
It’s been Blue Lake time again: that time of year when for 3 years now, we at Laroque have come to expect great entertainment from the musicians of the Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in Michigan, USA, as well as some music from our own LDO Big Band.
This year, we welcomed a slightly different group from previous years – the International Jazz Band. Mostly still in their teens, these players have been selected for the European tour not only because they’re good at what they do, but they’re hungry to become even better. They want to seize the opportunity to spend time in cultures other than their own, and to perform in locations throughout parts of Europe, from prestigious concert halls and cathedrals, to smaller town venues like ours.
At the end of last night’s concert, the band’s conductor and group director Bill MacFarlin, spoke of how these chances for young Americans to travel and make music was a real opportunity to foster international friendship and understanding.
We’ve been watching that at work over the last 3 days. The Blue Lake team, 17 of them, arrived in sunshine to a big welcome group in the Municipal Park.
Our School of Music’s housed here in the château. I took this shot just before everyone arrived
The event went well, but it was easy to see the Americans and French weren’t mixing much – it was too hard to communicate: Malcolm’s and my interpreting skills were much in demand (Not that we’re much good. I listened to our French head honcho, Michel Alvarez, and carefully interpreted it to Bill McFarlin. Bill raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you realise’, he said ‘that you’ve just said all that entirely in French?’).
A giraffe of beer
Later, down at the bar with older students and members of LDO Big Band it got a lot easier. The giraffe of beer may have helped.
Lucas Munce – with a clarinet this time
It was next day that real change took place. First of all, there was a Master Class, with Lucas Munce, acclaimed as a saxophonist back in the US (AND for his clarinet and flute playing too), and Parker Grant, a young jazz pianist also gaining recognition. After a slow start, the need to exchange musical knowledge overcame shyness and the language barrier.
Then after a shared meal it was time to rehearse. Towards the end of the evening, members of the French and American bands sat together to practise the pieces they planned to play together to conclude Fridays’ concert. It was wonderful to witness them, heads together as they pored over their shared scores, animatedly and enthusiastically discussing their music. Their mutual comprehension of each other’s tongues seemed to have moved up a gear, but above all they now had a shared language – music.
Blue lake International Jazz Band and LDO Big Band at rehearsal
By the time Friday’s concert came, these musicians were friends. They greeted each other affectionately and settled down to listen to each other’s performances with relish. When they had to squeeze themselves together for those final numbers, placing themselves alternately American/French, they were confident to give the music their all. They loved it. The audience loved it.
Blue Lake and LDO saxophonists share the moment at Friday’s concert
At the moment of parting, there were hugs and all round and quite a few sniffles too. As ambassadors for their country, Blue Lake do a pretty fine job.
If you live in a small town like ours, you look for excitement where you can. Today, l‘Ariégeoisepassed our house. This is a cycle race organised just before the Tour de France every year in our department. Unlike the Tour itself, you can choose which of three races to join. The truly serious do l‘Ariégeoiseitself: 160 km, with 3430 metres of climbing to do. The fairly serious do Le Mountagnole, 117.400 km, 2569m climb. And the ones who are frankly playing at it do the Passejade, a mere 68.5 km, with a 745m. climb.
The two first groups were due to cycle through Laroque, and we locals were ready at 10 o’clock, lining the streets to cheer them on. L’Ariégeoise marshals with Stop-Go batons in red and green strutted about importantly, directing the traffic, stopping and diverting cars as necessary.
The first cohort arrived, swished at speed past our house…and was gone.
Seconds later, some of them did a hasty U-turn and cycled back again, turned right across the bridge and picked up speed in a different direction. What could be going on?
The parting of the ways
It turned out that l’Ariégeoises and the Mountagnoles, who until then had been sharing a route, parted company here. The Mountagnoles had no special marshals, and when the time came, with heads down and intent only on completing their circuit in record time, they followed the l’Ariégeoise pack. And somel’Ariégeoises followed the Mountagnoles pack.
Erm…..should we be here?
With nothing but their batons and booming voices to help them, l’Ariégeoise marshals tried to sort the sheep from the goats and send everyone on the correct path. But it was hopeless. More and more cyclists went wrong, and the area round the bridge became a clutter of wheeling tumbling bikes and their confused riders. Some of them were amused. Others not. ‘Merde!’, ‘putain!’ and worse coloured the air as they saw their hard-won average speeds taking a turn for the worse.
A marshal tries to hold things together
I recorded some of the juicier moments and uploaded a short video to YouTube. Why don’t you have a look?
Summer’s arrived: well, this week anyway. So from before breakfast until long after the evening meal we’re spending as much time as we can out in the garden. And we have plenty of company. Lizards. Common wall lizards, podarcis muralis. They are indeed spectacularly common here. We have no idea exactly where they live, but there are plenty who call our garden ‘home’. We’re beginning to get to know a few.
Easily the most identifiable is Ms. Forktail, she of the two tails. She’s the only one we’ve been able to sex conclusively as well, because we caught her ‘in flagrante’ with Mr. Big behind the gas bottles recently. And then the next day she was making eyes at a younger, lither specimen, and the day after that it was someone else. She’s lowering the moral tone of our back yard.
Longstump
Then there’s Longstump, who’s lost a tiny portion of tail, and Mr. Stumpy, who hasn’t got one at all, though it seems not to bother him. Redthroat has a patch of crimson under her chin. There are several youngsters who zip around with enthusiasm and incredible speed.
In fact they all divide their time between sitting motionless for many minutes on end, and suddenly accelerating, at top speed and usually for no apparent reason, from one end of the garden to the other, or vertically up the wall that supports our young wisteria. On hot days like this (36 degrees and counting) they’ll seem to be waving at us. Really they’re just cooling a foot, sizzled on the hot wood or concrete. Sometimes you’ll see them chomping their way through some insect they’ve hunted, but often they’ll step carelessly and without interest over an ant or other miniature creepy-crawly in their path.
Happy hour for Longstump
Mainly they ignore one another, but sometimes there are tussles. These may end with an uneasy standoff, or with the two concerned knotted briefly together in what could scarcely be described as an act of love.
We could spend hours watching them, and sometimes we do. But there is still a bathroom to build, a workroom to fit out, and a pergola to design. The kings and queens of the yard have no such worries. They can do anything: they choose not to.
When guests come to stay, Malcolm and I often pore over maps looking for some unexplored – by us – corner of our patch. But in the end, what’s the point? Our visitors aren’t sickly pale wraiths whose jaded walking appetites have to be tempted by novelty. They’re happy with the solid day-to-day fare just a mile or two down the road. To them, in any case, everything is new.
We too are happy to revisit favourite walks. They’re never the same. The changing seasons bring different flowers, different cloud formations. Mountains which perhaps were sparkling bluish-white last time we visited, turn green and purple towards summertime with just the odd small patch of snow near their summits.
Today, then, we went with Christine to visit our old friend Roquefixade, just a few miles away. A steady climb through the juniper-scented woods and along a rocky ridge leads to a ruined château, once far above us, now somewhat below. Here it is. Enjoy the views. We did.
The village of Roquefixade far below. We were there half an hour ago.
The gently clanking bells on the Gascon cattle joined the birdsong as our accompaniment
First view from our walk of the Château of Roquefixade
Castellated rocky crags complement the ruined château
View through the castle wallls
The 11th century château may have had a 17th century makeover
View from the château
..and another one
Wind and rain have sculpted these ruined limestone archways
Conquering the castle and raising the Occitan flag
Flowers by the flagpole
Walking back towards the village, the château above us once more
We’ve been walking north of Carcassonne today, with our friends Barbara and Tim, holidaying in the Aude from North Yorkshire. When we decided to go and explore the curious stone huts called capitelles in the scrubby garrigue near Conques sur Orbiel, we assumed they were something like the orris of the Ariège. These too are small sturdy dry stone wall huts: but orris were used by upland shepherds.
The dry stone walls of the capitelles
Capitelles are quite different. Following the formation of France’s Second Republic in 1848, everyone wanted something to call their own. Here in Conques, the poorest members of society looked beyond the village where they lived for some way of acquiring a bit of land and earning some extra money. They realised that the dry impoverished soils of the garrigue were good for only one crop: vines. As the peasants started to work the land to plant their vines, they dug up stones – hundreds of stones. And they used them in the first place to make low stone walls marking the limit of their territory.
That south-facing door’s not very big
After that they built small huts to shelter from bad weather. These round or square huts are in the form of a dry stone wall rising to a semi-circular vaulted roof also in stone: no mortar, no foundations, a bare earthed-floor and a single small door, always facing south. They were all built by1880 or so, and the peasants who built the huts and worked the land here would have done so in any spare time left from their ‘day jobs’ as farm labourers. And this continued till the Fist World War. Men left to become soldiers, and at much the same time phylloxera struck. This double blow meant the area returned to uncultivated garrigue, and only recently have the capitelles been restored. They add interest to a stony landscape characterised by scrubby vegetation, low trees and shrubs and bright ground-hugging summer flowers. I’d have said distant views of the Pyrenees too, but today was misty and overcast, so Barbara and Tim had to take our word for it.
We thought we knew Laroque. An afternoon’s walk round town with local historian Paul Garrigues as part of this weekend’s Journées du Patrimoine has convinced us otherwise.
The bridge near our house is modern and slightly re-sited. But we had no idea that the main road it’s on, leading to one the busiest roads in the Ariège, the D625 to Lavelanet, used not to exist. To go to Lavelanet, you used to go straight up the hill, and down back-street Rue des Pas Perdus.
To those in the know, evidence of the former town gates
And here you’d go through one of the town gates. Using this path day after day to reach our garden, we’d never noticed the buttressing that indicated the former presence of these gates. Nor did we suspect that the narrow road and path which is now a way-marked walker’s route which passes past our garden, down to the River Touyre was once a busy thoroughfare. You follow the river to the former railway line, where you turn right and take a shady tree-lined route barred to anything more technical than a bicycle through the next village, Dreuilhe, and on into Lavelanet. Quite different from the lorry-van-and-busy-commuter route now in operation.
Once upon a time the main road to Lavelanet. Now the path past our garden.
We knew our town is an old one. It’s not uncommon to pass houses whose door lintels are inscribed with a date from the 17th century.
A nearby house announces its d.o.b.
What we didn’t know was that in the old town itself, there are no buildings at all from before this time. This is because every single dwelling was destroyed during the French Wars of Religion (1562 – 1598). The crisis was so grave the King permitted the townspeople an amnesty from paying taxes for several years to give them a chance to rebuild.
But before all that was …. the Women’s Revolt. Back in the 16th century, the women of the town would bring their bread to be cooked at the Four Banal, the site of which lives on today as a street name.
Rue Montée du Four Banal: the sign’s fixed to remnants of the old town wall
They paid the local lord to manage this service and the lord paid a baker. Who decided to exact his own charges too – one loaf in every 20. When the women’s angry protests were ignored, some 80 women held a somewhat violent demonstration, and followed up by taking their bread to nearby Esclagne and La Bastide to be baked. It all ended up in an enquiry directed from Carcassonne. Result? It was the baker himself who was found to be at fault: his taxes were illegal, but it was the lord who had to reimburse the women. For their part the women were forbidden to have their bread baked elsewhere. The Four Banal itself is by yet another former town gate, and traces of the old town wall still exist.
Perhaps the Four Banal looked like this?
It was during this period too that several streams ran through the town, forced into culverts between the houses, with little wooden bridges built over. They were useful to all the artisans involved in various aspects of the textile industry and other trades. Can you imagine the smells you’d have had to endure if you were unlucky enough to live in the same street as the tanner?
More recently, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Laroque was a prosperous commercial centre for its then more than 4000 inhabitants (2000 now) and the workers who flocked from a wide area to work in the textile mills. There were three cafés in the market square alone, as well as an hotel. Three abattoirs too, to serve the needs of all the butchers – one was in what’s now our garage. And shops of every description in what are now entirely residential streets. Then as now there was a huge social mix. One fine house, now down on its luck, was built for a successful surgeon and his banker son.
Once a surgeon’s house: now increasingly shabby
So now we’ll keep our eyes open, and perhaps notice those clues of former commercial activity: a ring set in a wall perhaps, for a trader delivering stock to tie up his horse or donkey, as well as the more obvious painted-over shop signs. I-Spy for residents.
I-Spy a delivery man’s tethering ring
I-Spy a shop front: one of the several vintners in town
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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