Walking Through Gascony

I was now walking through the department of Le Gers - formed from the old provinces of Guyenne and Gascony, and now part of the Midi-Pyrénées region. (You can still occasionally hear Gascon spoken here - it's really a dialect of Occitan, the old language of south-west France.) This is a lovely area - characterized by bastide towns and quiet villages, isolated farms and rolling farmland, low hills, scattered woods, and fields full of sunflowers, grain crops, ducks and cows. It's quite depopulated - and a favourite place for English and other European immigrants. The local food is excellent - though I avoided the foie gras - and drink specialities include Armagnac brandy and Floc de Gascogne (which is a fortified sweet wine or vin de liqueur, a mixture of Armagnac and grape juice, normally drunk as an apéritif but sometimes with dessert). I did not avoid these! Here's a typical view of the landscape:

In the hilltop bastide of Monferran-Savès I emptied my rucksack of all unnecessary stuff and sent it back home via the very helpful post office. The fashionably dressed village postmistress (she was très à la mode - this is France, remember!) seemed to have all the time in the world to help me - nothing was too much trouble - and she directed me to an equally helpful grocery store, where they gave me a cardboard box in which to pack my things. It was a relief to carry a little less weight. On leaving the village I passed this old, brick-built bread oven:

And soon after that I reached my accommodation for the night - a private pilgrim gîte on the 1st floor of a beautifully renovated old farmhouse (Le Grangé) set in the middle of nowhere. It was absolutely superb. François, the owner and hospitalier, welcomed me, and we sat on the terrace in the warm sunshine drinking sirop de menthe and cracking walnuts from his own walnut tree. He also had some fig trees and an apple orchard, and a Russian vine - its leaves in fiery red autumn colours - swathing 2 walls of the house. Departing rather reluctantly the next morning after a quick burst of blues on the piano, I'd reached Gimont by lunchtime. Gimont was yet another bastide town:

In the town centre I was surprised to find the timbered roof of the old market hall entirely spanning the main road, the RN124:

In A Little Hilltop Village

In 1930 the Tarn burst its banks and flooded Moissac, destroying 617 houses and drowning 120 people. I left Moissac on 3 November and my morning's walk continued this watery theme. I followed the Canal de Garonne for 12 km. This canal runs from Bordeaux to Toulouse where it joins the Canal du Midi, thereby connecting the Atlantic Ocean with the Mediterranean Sea. (The complete stretch is known as the Canal des Deux Mers.) At one point I knew I passed the confluence of the Tarn and Garonne rivers. But it was quite misty and I couldn't make out anything very much except for the occasional lone cyclist or jogger who ghosted by. From the canalside village of Pommevic (there's a nuclear power station here but I didn't see it) I headed on a quiet country road across flat farmland towards the hilltop village of Auvillar.

Auvillar was the 1st of many bastide towns and villages I would either see distantly or visit throughout the rest of the département of Tarn-et-Garonne and in the next département of the Gers. Bastides were fortified settlements built in south-west France, in medieval Languedoc, Gascony and Aquitaine, during the 13th and 14th centuries. They were normally built to a grid pattern, and situated on hilltops for defensive reasons. The photo shows the beautifully restored medieval market hall in Auvillar's central square.

At Auvillar I encountered an artist painting, in the style of Van Gogh, a large and colourful mural for the local school. As was my custom I approached him for a chat. We talked about the big influx of English people to the area. "10% of the population of Auvillar is now English," he commented. I asked if that caused any problems (we often hear the French blaming incomers for the property price hikes affecting the whole of France). "Well, house prices have gone up, it's true," he said. "But there are many reasons for that. We have nothing against the English living here. As long as they mix in and join village society. However there are some English cliques which keep themselves to themselves and won't even attempt to learn French or take part in communal village life..."