Rocamadour is fantastic, there can be no doubt of that, but even from our park above we could see the buses and the hordes. We beg your pardon for our cowardice.
When you drive from Lacave to L’Hospitalet, above Rocamadour, you take, or I should say you can take, the little D247, a pipsqueak of a road, narrow and almost without any traffic. It is a lovely road that goes past a goat farm, milking sheds, a little fromagerie and of course, a tasting room and a sales counter. I had an hour or so in the afternoon before dinner and the usual pre-dinner Campari-soda, and so resolved to go back to this charming spot that we had passed in the morning.
From our hotel Le Pont de l’Ouysse right next to the Ouysse River, we looked up at the picturesque Château Belcastel, but when you actually drive through Lacave and on to the D247 you climb suddenly a cliff that is higher than the one on which Belcastel is built and, lo and behold, you are looking down on Belcastel and on the confluence of the Ouysse and the Dordogne. It is such a rapid and dramatic change of scenery. God, or the French, have left plenty of spots where you can pull off the road and park. I did so, and walked back to look at that wonderful view — rivers, villages of stone and slate and tiles, outcrops of rock of the same colour as the houses and châteaux and churches, cliffs of rock but partially clothed in oak trees in their deepest spring green with the sun slipping lower in the west, clouds, but some blue sky…stone, slate, tiles, trees, water, sky and a gentle breeze, and above all — silence.
The soil here is impregnated with natural limestone gravel and supports moderately high grasses of several kinds and wild flowers of many, many different species: orchids, buttercups, geranium, red poppies, white flowers in clumps and singly. All lovely. I wandered on while the breeze whispered to me of ages past, of history and of peace and of the famous and the ordinary people of France over many centuries.
There were clumps of juniper bushes but their fruit was still green, as I soon found, there were other bushes about head height and there were little groves of stunted oaks. There was a farm further ahead on my right and it had one of those ridiculously flimsy post and wire fences that you see all over France — flimsy but successful it seems. It is hard to believe that they keep in the farm animals but apparently they do.
I turned slowly and looked around the full 360º. What I thought, if God had used different colours, the way that painters sometimes do. Couldn’t he have reversed things and made the trees blue and the sky green? Couldn’t the sea have been red? Oh, there were all sorts of possibilities, but as I resumed my walk through the grass and the small and scrubby oaks I had to admit that it had all been rather well done. It was difficult to improve on his work, even if you were a painter.
The late afternoon was perfect and I resolved to drive on. A short way down the road was a paddock of grass that had been cut and baled. The round bales glowed yellow and orange and reminded me of Vincent Van Gogh’s painting of haymaking in Provence. I stopped the car and went over to lean on the fence and gaze. Definitely Van Gogh-ish. The evening light was just filtering in and the stubble and the bales stood out the more strongly.
The fromagerie was on towards L’Hospitalet and I went there and parked some distance from the buildings. I had seen their herd of goats in the morning and even from where I had parked, you could hear their baa as they were being milked. I reflected that I should go in and taste their product — the area is famous for its goats’ cheese — but if I did I could only buy enough for lunch tomorrow; any more and it would not keep. So I reluctantly decided not to trouble them.
Across the road, on this rather dry plateau or causse someone had established a small vineyard which they had first surrounded with low stone walls and had then subdivided in the same way. Perhaps it had once been two very small vineyards belonging to different people. It was old — one hundred years perhaps. The vines weren’t neglected — they had been weeded and tilled — but they showed their age in their knobbly black trunks and many had died and there were gaps in the rows. Nonetheless, the spring growth gave them green and erect bushes which contrasted with the white-grey stone fences and the buff stones in the soil. There were two angular and sparse almond trees along the dividing fence and in the distance, but quite distinct, was a small hut or buron with a charcoal coloured roof of flat stones surmounted by a tiny spire in the gold stone.
Romanesque churches, châteaux, hôtels (elegant houses), monasteries, cloisters — we had seen them in their dozens — and we had seen them in all their glory, but was there anything to touch what I had seen that afternoon bordering the narrow D247? I doubt it. Such simplicity. But isn’t that the crux of it all, simplicity? And it is a theme that runs through many aspects of our lives. Even in food and cooking there is nothing to beat simplicity — a piece of good fish beautifully cooked and unadorned except perhaps for a squeeze of lemon, a drizzle of olive oil, and naturally, a few boiled kipfler potatoes beside it on a plain plate.
I drove slowly back to le Pont de l’Ouysee with the sun just disappearing behind me and in front of me, on the other side of the river the cliffs holding precariously to the last of the light.
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