Category: Walking

A hearty walk, English style

Back in France, we go out with our walking group most Sundays.  ‘Most’, not ‘all’.  Some are just too damn’ tough, but more often, it’s because the walk’s been cancelled.  Rain stopped play.  Unlike their English counterparts, no French hiker wants to hole up behind some convenient rock at midday to fuel up on a damp spam sandwich.  No, lunchtime on a French walk is the opportunity for an extended picnic in some scenic spot, when someone will produce a pastis, someone else a home-made cake or chunks of chocolate, and the whole thing will be rounded off with sugar lumps soaked in some potent home made hooch.  And you can’t do that when the weather’s poor.

We English are made of sterner stuff.  As we discovered just after Christmas.  Our Friends Hatti and Paul arrange a post-festivity walk for about 20 of their friends each year.  It blows away the cobwebs and gets rid of some of those unwanted calories we all seem to absorb throughout December.

On the day, it was intermittently raining.  The wind was gusting and the sky was solidly grey.  Did anyone cancel?  Certainly not!  Instead we were all welcomed at our rendez-vous point with hot coffee or a warming nip of home made sloe gin, and route -maps to send us on our way.

Fording our first stream

The walk itself was under 5 miles long.  But we got our work-out alright.  Leg muscles strained to heave limbs out of gloopy mud, or to leap from stepping stone to stepping stone across overrflowing streams.  Vocal chords often gave up the unequal struggle as wind whipped away shouted attempts at conversation.  Our feet became heavier and heavier with the weight of solid clay sticking to our boots .

But it was fine, dear French reader.  We had fun.  Along the route, we spotted a rainbow which accompanied our path for much of the journey. Welcome pauses in the wind and rain gave us the chance to appreciate the scenery: the skeletal trees set against the grey-green hillsides: the stone farm cottages and the folly at Azerley and the rushing tumbling streams which punctuated our journey.

Arriving at Kirkby Malzeard

No soggy spam sandwiches for us. At journey’s end, we were snug and warm in the Queen’s Head at Kirby Malzeard.  Paul and Hatti had organised sandwiches and chips to be be ready and waiting as we arrived.  And that, surely, is the perfect walk.  A good work-out in good company in lovely countryside, followed by the chance to relax and laugh with friends and food, knowing that nothing more taxing than a hot bath and cosy evening indoors remains to conclude a well-spent day.

Le Chemin de la Liberté

Good to look at. Less easy to cross

My last post wasn’t entirely serious.  That walk in the Pyrennean mists was fun despite the weather.  We were well nourished (energy bars, abundant picnic food, and a delicious walnut cake that Michel shared).  Thanks to the miracle of Gore-Tex and microfibres, we were warm and dry, and after it was over, we knew we’d be driving back to our cosy homes and family life.

But if you’d asked most of us whether we’d want to submit ourselves to a walk even more gruelling, every day for 4 days, in constant fear for our lives, maybe in the depths of winter, we’d have been certain to answer ‘no’.

Not so the men and women who during the Second World War risked their lives across the Pyrenees along paths such as le Chemin de la Liberté.  On Monday, as part of its Remembrance season, the BBC broadcast its own tribute to those who trekked for 4 days up 4,750 metres of difficult, rocky terrain, in conditions that could change from mist to snow, to dazzling sun, to sleet several times in the course of a single day.  These people – more than a 1000 of them over the whole period – were Allied soldiers and airmen who’d found themselves in enemy territory, escaped POWs and Jewish refugees: and the French and Spanish who helped them across the mountains to Spain.

Escapees had little choice.  They were brave and resourceful from sheer necessity.  But those who sheltered them as they travelled south through occupied Europe, prepared for their journeys, who shared the little they had, who interpreted, forged documents, sourced warm clothing so servicemen could ditch their tell-tale uniforms, those ‘passeurs’ who guided them to the comparative safety of Spain took unimaginable risks.

Would I have been brave enough to put my life on the line for strangers?  Especially if in doing so, I risked the lives of my own family?  I’m glad I don’t have to ask myself this question.  More than a 100 ‘passeurs’ were caught and either executed or deported. 450 Ariègeois who assisted the escapees were deported – that’s one in 330 inhabitants of the region at the time.  And they’re only the ones who were caught.  Many others, somehow, weren’t.

A couple of years ago, a friend in the choir told me a story, a part of her family history.  It didn’t happen in the Ariège, and it’s nothing to do with the passeurs, but it has stayed with me as a telling example of the desperation and bravery often shown in this period.  Her family then lived in an isolated village in the Creuse, and they’d given shelter to a young Jewish girl for the duration.  If  searches were conducted – and they were – this child was inserted into one of those long bolsters the French used to favour, and arranged on the made-up bed.  She simply had to lie there, still as a corpse, till the search was over.  She survived.  They survived.

At least she didn’t have to flee with a miscellaneous band of other inexperienced escapees: soldiers, mothers, underfed and frightened people, led by a series of local guides over often treacherous mountain passes – no waymarks and well-trodden paths here.  At least her mother wasn’t asked to suffocate her because her pathetic cries might alert a German patrol.  These things happened. Those times are over: but the memories live on.

Present day travellers take le Chemin de la Liberté

Sunday Rando

7.00 a.m. Sunday.  22 Ariègeois radios were switched on for the day’s weather forecast.  ‘It’ll be an exceptionally sunny and hot day for the time of year, throughout France.  Temperatures in the south will reach 23 degrees in some places.’  22 satisfied listeners, members of the Rando del’Aubo, switched off their radios…. without bothering to listen to the end of the forecast.  Instead they turned to the more important business of packing their rucksacks for a rather heavy-duty walk an hour and a half’s drive from Mirepoix, la Forêt d’en Malo.

François talks us through the walk. This is it, in cross-section

With a stiff climb of 700 metres in prospect, a 14 km. walk isn’t a stroll in the park.  But the payoff as you emerge from the forest is an extraordinary panorama of the Pyrénées, jagged teeth of rock emerging from the thickly forested mountainsides: especially lovely in autumn as the trees turn from yellow, through ochre, to magenta and crimson.

As we drove eastwards, the cloud and mist descended. We parked, we walked, we climbed, we scrambled and we struggled for three hours as the mists became ever damper and more clinging, and an unexpected cold wind whipped across the mountain side.  And at the top, this was our view.

We hadn’t listened to the end of the forecast you see.  What we should have known that our little patch of south eastern France was a little bad-weather cold spot.  There we were bang in the middle of it.

As we finished our walk, the weather lifted a bit, and gave us a small taste of what we should have enjoyed

Later, back at home, our smug families recounted how they’d spent the day in shorts and tee shirts.  Maybe they’d had a little bike ride, a gentle stroll in the sunshine, a drink on the terrace in the hot sun……

Les Gorges de la Carança

I’d half written this post in my head before we even set off for our weekend away.  It was going to be all about how, despite my pretty high-maintenance vertigo, I managed to defeat my terrors and have a day’s climbing up vertical ladders and swaying bridges, inching along narrow paths high above the vertical drop to the bottom of les Gorges de la Carança.

We went there, I did all of the above, and astonishingly, I was never once gripped up by that all-too-familiar fear which prevents me from peeking over the edge of any castle battlements or church towers I’m foolish enough to ascend.

It was the Rando del’Aubo who proposed this overnight trip, high up into the Cerdagne region of the Pyrénées Orientales.  It’s a gorgeous area of high steeply sloped and densely forested mountains and wide deep valleys, green and fertile.  This is Catalan France, with a strongly Spanish feel, where Catalan is written and spoken almost as much as French, and the cuisine is very different from our homely Ariègeois farmyard and hunter’s fare.

We were tourists on our first day – that’s for a later blog.  Sunday was the day of the gorges.  A spectacular drive from our overnight accommodation, a few decisions to take about how much clothing to wear (early in the day, it was already hot), and we were off.

I wish my pictures told a better story.  It’s hard to convey the grandeur of the scenery, to show how very vertical and high the gorge sides are, and therefore how nerve-wracking parts of the walk were.  We enjoyed our six hour day, but it’s possible to spend two days exploring the area.  We were merely amateurs.

We spent much of the morning scrambling up craggy paths alongside a tumultuously noisy stream: and then there were scary catwalks clinging to vertical rock faces; ladders and suspension bridges, high above the water, often almost enveloped in the trees.  It wasn’t till the afternoon that we walked the Cornice, the narrow walkway hacked into the (vertical, of course) rock face – with a 400 metre drop to the bottom of the gorge.  The rewards, if you don’t frighten yourself to death by looking down, are the views of the peaks; craggy, splintered rocks of grey, white and ochre; of stunted and deformed trees clinging and growing with unexpected vigour to tiny fissures in the rock; the plant life, similarly finding footholds in this very challenging environment, and the butterflies, fluttering in huge numbers everywhere we looked.

It was a wonderful experience:  for the views, for the physical challenge of the roughy-toughy climbs and descents, for the feeling of risks overcome.  Yesterday too, we felt very lucky to have spent the day there.  It was hot, but pleasantly so in this forested place at an altitude of not too far from 2000 metres.  As we drove homewards and the temperatures increased, we realised just how unbearably hot and sweaty we’d have felt if we’d just stayed at home and loafed around the garden.

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Spring has sprung

All over Europe it seems, people are shedding their woolly pullies and revelling in the  balmy air, as plants unfurl new leaves and flowers, and animals mate and give birth.

This was the lac de Montbel at the very end of last week.We enjoyed the views.  The cows enjoyed the views.Though this mother preferred to keep her calf safe at her side.Dozens of lizards sunbathed on the newly warmed rocks.  Here’s one.And here’s some sloe blossom.  I’ll be back in the Autumn for the mouth-puckeringly sour fruits  to make sloe gin or vodka.There’s only one problem.  The warm weather has brought out all the biting insects.  They soon found me.

SOS Air Ambulance

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, 2 hours of it, and were looking forward to lunch in – oooh, maybe 10 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.

The sapeurs pompiers 4×4
…followed by the ambulance
The nurses arrive
They came in this hélico
And here it is
Micheline, saline drips, medical attention and fellow-walkers
Stretcher case
Preparing for a helicopter ride
Lift off
‘Bye Micheline!
Some flowers for Jean-Paul to offer the patient
Finally, we got lunch. This was our view

The Principality of the Brothers Grimm. And Stone Soup.

Sunday. We went to Nébias in the Aude. Just outside the village, you’ll find The Labyrinthe Verte, a natural maze, with winding pathways through a forest, where rocks and plants have created a bewildering array of natural passageways which are both beautiful and fun to explore. These paths are cut deep through limestone, often shoulder height.  Somehow, we’ve never visited.  But today, thanks to the Rando del’Aubo, our walking group, we did.

It’s been a lovely bright spring day today, but the forested labyrinth is never really sunny.  Trees, their trunks and branches bearded with feathery fronds of moss and lichen, crowd the limestone crags and fissured passageways.  Deprived of light and space, they assume crippled and fanciful shapes, or else aim straight for the sun, their thin trunks competing with each other for a place to establish their roots.  It’s not eerie however.  On this warm March day, we wouldn’t have been surprised to meet an ethereal band of fairies whirling through the dampened glades: on a bad night in November, perhaps a gnarled and wicked hag from the tales of the Brothers Grimm.

Every time of year has its own magic apparently.  On the coldest days of winter, the mosses and lichens are white and crisp with frost, making the forest fit for a Snow Queen

At lunch time, since we were in France and eating’s important, the darkened passages unexpectedly cleared.  Suddenly, beneath blue skies and bright sunshine there was a fissured limestone pavement, providing surfaces and seating for our lunchtime picnic.  Which Malcolm didn’t have with him.  The members of the group magicked their very own version of Stone Soup for him.  A mustardy ham baguette, some home cured sausage, a chunk of bread, a chocolate pudding, and apple….within half a minute, Malcolm had more food then the rest of the group put together.

The afternoon was different.  Walking away from the enchanting and enchanted labyrinth, we came to more open country, where we passed first farmland, then the edges of forest with tracks showing where wildboar and deer had recently passed.  Finally, we climbed, and had views across to the mountains and the walks we’ve enjoyed there on other Sunday rambles, finishing up listening to the lively splashing of a waterfall.

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Rando commando: or….training for the TA?

Yesterday, we randonneurs headed for the Aude, for a pleasant easy 18 km. walk round a man made lake, la Ganguise.  Not too much climbing, just open views across the lake itself, and to the Pyrénées beyond.  François pointed out that the lake got bigger some three years ago, when more land was flooded to increase its capacity.  Drowned footpaths had not yet been replaced, so we’d simply  be walking at the edge of the lake.  A healthy, but not too hearty day out.  Or so we thought……  Here’s our day, in pictures

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No snow yesterday: mountain views and a Benedictine abbey

Distant Pyrénées. Not my photo, not the view we saw. But you get the idea
Distant Pyrénées. Not my photo, not the view we saw. But you get the idea

I gather that the last thing anyone in England needs right now is someone chirruping about how beautiful the snow is.  Well, here in the foothills of the Pyrénées, we’ve been almost alone in France in being a snow-free zone.  But please note: ‘the foothills’. The mountain tops have been covered for some weeks, and over the last week, the snow levels have crept down..and down…and ever nearer. And it’s quite simply beautiful.

Distant Pyrénées

Yesterday we went walking in the Lauragais.  That’s a gentle, verdant region north of here on the edge of la Montagne Noir.  Perhaps the most wonderful thing about the walk we had here, through sandy woodland paths, crunchy with fallen leaves, were the views across to the Pyrénées: mile after mile of distant peaks blanketed in blue-white snow beneath a bluer sky.  If only my camera began to do justice to this impressive sight.

A misericord to support a monkish bottom
Abbaye de Saint Papoul
Abbaye de Saint Papoul

Healthily exercised, we came down to the village of Saint Papoul, and looked round the Benedictine Abbey of the same name.  I found myself lingering in the 14th century cloisters and in the abbey itself, inspecting the misericords, the small decorated wooden shelves hidden under the seats to provide a bit of support for the poor monks as they stood for long hours during their religious devotions.

The Flight into Egypt

Perhaps the most enjoyable bit of our visit was a chance to look at the special exhibition devoted to le Maître de Cabestany, a Romanesque sculptor who seems to have left his mark on many of the pilgrimage churches on the route from Rome to Compostella.

The infant Jesus takes a bath

His figures, despite their realism, their chunky hands and elongated eyes, seem to have a slightly supernatural feel to them and they were fun to explore and enjoy.

It was cold though.  Snow threatened, but didn’t fall in the end.  We decided against a mooch round the village: probably something to do in the future, and scurried back home to toast our toes and fingers

The weathered pillars of the cloisters, and their equally weathered capitals

Walking for the Masses

Walking near Mirepoix. My camera does no justice at all to the Pyrénées
The FR banner

The French love walking – as in hiking.  The Fédération Française de la Randonnée Pédestre is an immensely popular organisation with all age groups, and with a somewhat younger image than the Ramblers’ Association.  The French walk alone, with friends, in groups such as ours, Les Rando del’Aubo, and …..on mega-rambles.

Early morning. Getting miles of tables ready for endless breakfasts

We first came upon the mega-ramble when our own group went along, a couple of years ago now, on a walk organised by the FF Randonnée Midi- Pyrénées group.  We and about 800 others.  It’s something of a military operation.  Breakfast is offered, refreshments along the route, which has to be signposted beforehand and cleared afterwards.  Photocopied maps are handed out, and when it’s all over, there are exhibits to mooch round, apéros to drink, trophies to award (the oldest walker, the person who’s travelled furthest to participate, that sort of thing).  There’s often a sit down meal on offer too, though not that day.

171 walkers wait to start off

Interesting, but walking with dozens – hundreds – of others isn’t really our thing. This means we quite often sit out the Sunday walk, because these occasions happen pretty often.

Today, I made an exception.  In France, basic health care is free, but most people chose to top up by insuring themselves with a Mutuelle, which covers all the bits the system doesn’t pay for.  To publicise themselves, and various health charities, the Mutuelles of the Ariège organised a walk near Mirepoix today, and they needed our help.

Post-walk snacks. Healthy, of course

Early this morning, under the covered market hall in Mirepoix we set up tables, prepared healthy breakfasts (breads, cheese, fruit juices, dried prunes) and registered walkers.  Some people waymarked the route, others acted as marshals, and lots of us got to walk as well. 171 walkers today.  Why would we be so public-spirited?  Perhaps this picture tells you why.

Sitting in the main square in the sunshine, enjoying the meal we were offered as a ‘thank you’ for our work earlier. We’d have done it anyway. A good day.

Something else though.  Sitting down with everyone after it was all over, I reflected how far we’ve come.  This week, Malcolm’s been in England, so apart from exchanging English/French conversation on Tuesday for an hour, and enjoying lunch with an English friend on Friday, I’ve spent the rest of my time walking or eating with friends, shopping, singing, going to the gym and all the rest, entirely in French (well, I’ve done some hard labour at home too.  But I only had myself to talk to).  Over two years ago, when we first sat down for a communal meal, we could see people’s eyes glaze with fear as they thought they were going to be stuck with that English couple.  Could we speak French?  Well, yes actually, but both easy chit-chat, and more serious discussion were difficult for us in a noisy group situation.  Today I was happy to be the only foreigner in the group: instead of fearing me, it was ‘Is that chair next to you free?  May I sit with you?’