Loyal readers may remember a post of mine from three weeks ago, when I shared my enthusiasm for half-timbered Troyes. It was impressive that so many houses were still, despite lurching at improbable angles in some cases, in excellent repair and condition.
Not all though. One of our walks, back from an early evening drink found us wandering down a narrow old street which wasn’t in good nick. It gave us the opportunity to study old building techniques: wattle and daub, and wooden nails.
But that wasn’t all. This street was filled with one obvious piece of street art – the header photo – then many others, mainly cats, which had to be hunted for by looking up, down, and all along.
Even that wasn’t all. An elderly dog walker, noticing our interest, urged us to nip back along to the square we’d just left and look at the wall to the side of the underground car park. So we did.
Reims and its cathedral has already qualified for a post on my blog. So has one of the images. But much as the architecture, the stained glass, the stone carving of these mediaeval cathedrals inspires awe, I just as much enjoy inspecting what the stonemasons got up to often in more hidden areas. Instead of saints, characters from the bible, earthly donors who needed their memorial, those masons seem to have relished chipping away to celebrate the more characterful inhabitants of the planet. And such statues often get more weather-beaten than most. Stacked on pallets and away from public view, I found this little lot hidden in an outside corner, awaiting a spot of restoration. They made my day.
It’s not really the time of year for fungi here in Europe, but we’ve just come back from Spain, and more importantly France, where at the right time of year, fungus-foraging is by way of being a national obsession. Find a secret cache in the woodlands, and no right thinking Frenchman will share its location with anyone: not brother, cousin, or best friend. An elderly man who lived up the road from us, back when we lived in the Ariège, took the knowledge of where his secret foraging-place was to his grave.
I too forage, as I was brought up doing. One of my earliest memories is of being got up by my mother at perhaps 5’clock to go to the local American airfield, disused since the war, to harvest field mushrooms and puffballs. I still forage – but very carefully. I’m sure only of field mushrooms and the unmistakeable puffball, as well as shaggy inkcaps and chanterelles.
Today though, for Denzil’s Nature Photo Challenge #8: Fascinating Fungi, I’m sharing pictures of the definitely inedible. Here are bracket fungi, and others that thrive on tree trunks and fallen timbers. I’m ashamed to say I don’t know the names of a single one: can anyone help? But there are no mushrooms-on-toast opportunities here!
From the wonders of nine hundred year old man-made cathedrals…
Reims Cathedral, built between 1211 and 1345
… to the perhaps two hundred and fifty million year old natural wonder which is the Gorges du Tarn (better photos later, I hope. My phone-camera was over-awed) …
The Gorges du Tarn, several million years in the making.
… to the twenty year old wonder which is the Millau Viaduct.
Millau Viaduct, the tallest bridge in the world, with a structural height of 336.4 metres.
The featured photo shows a spot of shock and awe from a weathered statue stacked outside Reims Cathedral and awaiting restoration.
We’re on our way to Spain to see daughter and family, trundling down through eastern France. Now we’re in the Aube, in Troyes. It’s been a successful city since Roman times, but what you see now is a place that still has hundreds of half-timbered houses. Still lived in, still used as shops and business-places. A few are in bad nick. Some are being renovated. Some lean at impossibly drunken angles. Most are well cared for and entirely habitable, just getting on with life, as they have been for centuries. And a few of them provide a convenient surface for discreet pieces of street art.
As you read this post, we’re on the road, heading for France, then Spain to see the Spanish branch of the family, and even to attend a wedding. Please expect little in the way of responses to comments, whether on your own blog or this one for the duration. But nine years ago, on 20th March, we were leaving our home in Laroque for the very last time…
Last news from Laroque
23rd March 2014
You’re making your last visit to Laroque today, for the time being. We left 3 days ago, and now we’re in Ripon. Those last days were a furore of packing, cleaning, ‘goodbyes’ (though never, never final farewells), and two visits from the removal firm, who couldn’t fit everything in, first time round. At this moment, perhaps, the person who bought our house is planning his own removal to Laroque.
I never told you, probably out of sheer superstition, the story of the house sale. The housing market’s incredibly tough in the Ariège just now. House prices have tumbled 25% since 2008. Properties remain unsold for one, two, three years, as unhappy owners reduce the price of their homes in hopes of at last attracting a buyer.
Whereas we had nothing but luck. A man from near Paris, house-hunting here, in the area where he’d grown up, saw our house, arranged to view, and said he liked it. A week later he came again, showing his ‘coup de cœur’ off to his mum and dad. He made a low-price offer, as you do. We refused it, as you do. But we offered him our non-attached garden, being sold separately, at a generous discount, and said we’d include some of the furniture in the house sale. Reader, he offered full price, and the rest is history. Vue-vendue.
We’d just locked the door for the last time. And helping us wave ‘Goodbye’ are Martine, Francis and Anaïs, almost the very first friends we made when we arrived.Nine years on, we have a granddaughter called Anaïs.
So here we are in Ripon, ready to house hunt and begin our new lives here. Oh, and there’s the Tour de France starting in Yorkshire too, in a couple of months. We’ll keep you posted.
Our luck continued here in England. The very first property we viewed to rent – as a temporary measure while we house-hunted for somewhere suitable – was the house we are still living in nine years on, with no intentions whatever of leaving.
It was twelve years ago this weekend that I realised that even ordinary-seeming mishaps on country walks can have very unfortunate consequences …
SOS Air Ambulance
March 20th, 2011
Poor Micheline. Her pain, her distress was our Sunday Soap Opera.
We’d gone walking with our Rando del’Aubo friends, near Nébias again. We’d yomped up a mountainside, two hours of it, and were looking forward to lunch in – oooh, maybe ten minutes. That’s when Micheline fell over a tree root.
It was bad. Very bad. Broken ankle? Knee? We still don’t know. Anny, who has GPS, ran off to find some kind of reception for her mobile, so she could ring emergency services, and give them our exact reference.
Pretty quickly, it became exciting. We were fairly inaccessible, though not as badly so as we might have been, considering we were almost at the top of a (smallish) mountain: because there was, for the first time that morning, open land nearby. A bright red ambulance service 4×4 came into view, then an ambulance, tossing about on the rutted track. The sapeurs pompiers had to walk down into the woods, carrying all their equipment and a stretcher, to see Micheline, who was now in quite a lot of pain. Then – wow! A helicopter air ambulance hovered overhead, looking for a landing spot.
The pictures show the efficient and organised crew. (11 of them, sapeurs pompiers, nurses, pilot) doing what they had to do in muddy, dirty conditions to get Micheline sedated and sorted and ready to be air-lifted to Carcassonne Hospital. They don’t show the 4×4 being ignominiously towed out of the mud by a local farmer.
Despite our compassion for Micheline and the acute pain and discomfort she was in, we were quietly excited to be part of such a drama, the first apparently, in Rando del’Aubo’s long history of weekend walks. No news from Micheline yet: but she won’t be at work tomorrow.
That was all I wrote in the immediate aftermath of the accident. In fact, Micheline -who worked in a shop – was never fit enough to return to an on-your-feet-all-day job. The French Ramblers’ Association argued for months about whose insurance should pick up the tab for the helicopter call-out. It was all a sorry mess, and I’ve thought twice since then about venturing to out-of-the-way places for a solitary walk.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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