fruit, water, cheese, delicious pâté de compagne (country terrine) and paper napkins et cetera. The punnet of hybrid wood strawberries (frais de bois) that I bought in my excitement, however, were well past their use-by date.
Champeix is just a pleasant village but the dwellings above the shops in the main street are all four floors in height. Why such accommodation in a place like this? Was it once home to more people than there appeared to be in 2008? It also had a small building which is somewhat rare in France. A toilet. Never mind that it was for men only. It is well known that women go but rarely. Toilets in France, or rather the lack of them, that is a lengthy subject. It is curious though that they are so little provided.
We found a spot to pull into for lunch and I walked through a meadow of grass, herbs and wildflowers to yet another fast flowing mountain stream. Everywhere there are streams or rivers, small and large and eventually they flow into the mighty Dordogne. If we had but a small proportion of these waters in Australia! There seemed to be more birds here than in other parts of France. I wondered if birds were making a comeback over here.
What a simple but what a satisfying lunch. Once…once a few trips ago we used to go into a restaurant for lunch. It was de rigour. How did we do it? And, more importantly, why did we? We hadn’t quite finished the baguette, so we crumbed it and threw it in the bushes for those French birds. The diesel fired, and we pulled back on to the road.
After you pass the turn off to the village of Verriers there is a small road on your left and a short way along there is a dolmen-something to gaze at and wonder about. It is a long way short of Stonehenge, of course, but what is it about these simple stones arranged by Celts some two thousand or more years ago. (Past Saint-Nectaire there is a menhir, and another dolmen but on the side road.)
Saint-Nectaire has been highly praised in some of the reference books (as has the cheese of that area) and it was with some excitement that we drove into the town and parked the car. What has happened to this famous little spa town? Our parking bay was next to the town’s public gardens, but alas they were overgrown and neglected. We walked up the hill towards a building which announced itself as the Casino. Was it closed for the season or forever? There were grand early nineteenth century houses beautifully set in the valley on one side of the main street and precariously and expensively moulded into the rocks and cliff on the other side. All were empty and many were à vendre-for sale.
We turned around and walked back down to the rather sad but once grand and opulent village. There was a hotel which appeared to have no customers at all, houses, no…mansions, but again most were for sale and the agents’ boards were tired, rusty and flapping in the breeze. There were two little bistros or cafés still doing reasonable luncheon business at this rather late hour. The specialities on the blackboards were tripe at one and pigs trotters at the other. I didn’t regret our picnic lunch.
We drove up past the Casino and took the road to the haut Saint-Nectaire. Ah, this was better, simpler. Real houses, gardens and shops, and there on the hill dominating the faithful and saluting God was the famous Romanesque church built over the grave of the local saint, Saint-Nectaire. I say it is Romanesque but in the style of the region with more than a hint of “Moorish” or perhaps with memories of what the Crusaders may have seen on their somewhat murderous travels to the Middle East.
The Auvergne, and specifically Clermont Ferrand, had a big hand in the First Crusade of the eleventh century. It was at the capital in 1095 that the former monk of Cluny, the Frenchman Pope Urban 11 made what was said to be some of the “most moving orations recorded in history”. He spoke to the crowd in the open, for not even the largest building could accommodate the multitude which came to heed his words. It is said that even the pope was surprised by the response. It was like the war cry of the American Indians or the Maoris of New Zealand. He had set in motion a force of bigotry, politics and plunder that lasted for more than a hundred years.
Don’t think of Tournus and its Romanesque cathedral, for example, when you think of the Auvergne and its old churches. There are similarities in construction but you might easily come to the conclusion that Notre Dame du Port at Clermont Ferrand, the Basilica at Orcival, the Saint-Nectaire church and a few others had been designed by the one architect and had the same builder. Of course they are all built of the dark volcanic rock of the area, and the face of the rock is in all cases relatively smooth, almost as if it had been sawn. In addition each church has a decorative mosaic which is beautifully done, but somehow to me, looks cold and fussy. Orcival is my favourite, partly because of its situation. It is softened by the valley, the trees and the nearby buildings. Saint-Nectaire dominates.
I always have a great affection for abbeys which, by necessity, I suppose are built in valleys near a source of water, but there is friendliness and humility in most abbeys, and their cloisters are very special. I like their background of the forest, the river and the seclusion. Vézelay is classified as an abbey cathedral, Conques has its delightful, exquisite abbey church, and Mont St. Michael is said to be an abbey complex, but one of my first abbeys to fit the description I’ve just given was Flaran, in the Gers, on the road from Auch to Condom and by the Baize River. It has been extensively restored over the last twenty or so years, but is still friendly and humble. You could spend your life there — perhaps.
You leave Saint-Nectaire and journey on towards Murol with its decaying but spendidly impressive fort or chateau away on the hill to your right and then you go through some of the loveliest grazing land populated by red Salers cattle and stubby, sturdy horses. The houses are few and far between but away off on the sides of the hills and in the valleys you can see these little stone farm buildings. They have great charm, nestling into the hillsides. They are of the same dark grey and black stone, and often have roofs of phondite, or split stone, yet nonetheless they blend into the countryside just as easily as the limestone houses in the lower Dordogne.
We took the Route du Fromage, which was probably designed to service the farms, villages and towns of the area, but which proves to be a scenic road along the ridges. The views of puys, mountains, valleys, drifts of snow and forests continue, and every now and again a mountain horse gazes at you or a herd of red milking cows raises numerous enquiring heads. Good country.
You come across Chambon-sur-Lac almost in surprise. It is quite beautiful, framed by mountains with their peaks still partly covered by slow drifting cloud. We stopped for coffee at a family run place which had dealt with its luncheon guests and was now satisfying its own hunger. The coffee was good.
By the time we got to Le Mont Dore, the afternoon was closing in and we took the cul-de-sac to Puy de Sancy. The mountain peak is spectacular but because you are already half way up the group of mountains it belies its height. It was very cold, painfully cold almost, but we managed to explore the hut near the terminus of the chair lift and to speak to a small mob of goats standing nearby. The hut housed a memorial (or perhaps a tomb) to two men of the Resistance who were killed in September 1944 in this remote and beautiful spot. What were they doing here? Why would the Germans have pursued them half way up this mountain?
How tragic it was that the maquis and its members of the Resistance the maquisards moved to combat the German occupying force as soon as they did. They were besotted, no doubt, with the euphoria of D-day, 6 June 1944, and overestimated their strength and grossly underestimated the wounded but still powerful German forces.
The town of Tulle is on the Corrèze river, a tributary of the Dordogne, and is just to the west of the Auvergne. The Resistance determined to seize Tulle and to defend it as one of the first French outposts of the “unoccupied” south. It was surrounded by hills, dear to the maquis, and had a small armaments industry. On 8 June the Resistance duly overpowered the German garrison and killed some fifty Germans in the process; they took a further sixty prisoners and executed ten of those on the basis that they were members of the Gestapo and had been responsible for atrocities. They then flew the French flag over the town and
