Back from the Ruins

I hope you've all been fine since I've been away.  I still don't have much time for blogging, and the last few weeks have been quite heavy for me but  I also had some time in France which was NOT a working trip, so I was able to do a bit of relaxing.  T and I stayed in a medieval hamlet called Blanc-sur-Sanctus, in the Aveyron, in South West France.

That was the view from the balcony in the house we rented, looking over a wooded and extremely steep valley in which was the remains of this hamlet. And this was the view the other way - there is an old barn attached to the house where we stayed. 

The main part of the hamlet centred round a 10th century fortified manor house which had been converted into a church.   It stood on a crag of rock, like a little castle.



Most of the villages in the area have castles - very picturesque but they reflect the harsh reality of life all those centuries ago.  I'm no French historian, but I gather the government was weak so not enough taxes could be collected, so the local lords couldn't create a decent army.  So when the enemy came marching along, the locals who were deemed worth saving fled to the castle.   The enemies could then settle down to batter the walls and wait for the locals to starve or run out of water. Not a very good military strategy for the locals, I'd say, even though they saved on the taxes....

The hamlet once had shops and businesses and a school, but it became depopulated over the centuries. Many of its houses and its tiny chapel fell into ruin.

It might have crumbled to nothing, but times changed and people came along and saw the charm of the place.   Now, several of the derelict houses have been converted into homes again.  It's quite an exciting place to be, because several local people have completely got into restoring the place, finding out about its history and the families who lived there (our rental house even had a book on the shelves about it - all in French, though). . They've converted the church into a public space and hold events there - and they've even rediscovered and restored its cross.

Since it wasn't a church for most of its life, there is some disagreement about whether the building should be restored as a church or a house, though..

Also, the old trackways have been cleared and marked as  hiking trails.  This picture was taken from one of the trails. You can see in the distanc the only sign of modern life -  big windmills installed by the electricity company.

To get to the hamlet you traverse a rather scary single track mountain road 6 km from the nearest village. Some of it is not fenced, some of the drops are quite steep and I was glad we'd hired the smallest size of car.  Actually I was REALLY glad when I met a tractor coming along in the other direction!.

The nearest village has the odd name of Brusque, and it has a shop, post office and school. That really makes it quite a bustling metropolis, don't you think? :)

I'll visit as many blogs as I can but I won't have too much time for blogging in the next few weeks.  Apart from anything else I have a couple of work trips this month, to Wales and to Switzerland, which I mentioned ages ago when they were in the planning stages. And there is still quite a bit going on in other ways.  But it was great to take some time out and I was so pleased to discover Blanc.