![]() ![]() In the last war, the complex of valleys and concealed ways provided perfect cover for the resistance as well as for Jewish families sheltered by locals in the remoter villages. The good side is that those green knuckles became peculiarly tolerant of rebels, the rustic fist opening throughout history to those fleeing persecution. ![]() I closed my eyes and imagined myself back on the southern chalk downs of England, perhaps in Edward Thomas’s time, before chemicals and cars: “The past,” as he put it, “is the only dead thing that smells sweet.” Last spring, after weeks of rain, this had a natural backing in the rush of a stream’s waterfall. We rarely go for a local walk without encountering a shepherd and that telltale tintinnabulation of neck-bells. A wolf print was found by our friends Jeremy and Alexandra, who run a gîte d’étape of yurts, wooden cabins and home-cooked food three miles up a forest track (jeep pick-up possible) “with a 360km horizon from the composting toilet,” as Jeremy puts it. Sheep and increasing numbers of deer make for an easy supper, and shepherds on minimum incomes are giving up under the strain. Like the vulture that feeds on the kills, the wolf is protected. Now a different kind of natural threat is endangering shepherding itself: the wolf. This is the main justification for its Unesco world heritage status: the survival of traditional “agro-silvo-pastoralism”, which is defined by mobility and transhumance: the sheep in unenclosed flocks, the shepherds walking alongside them or sitting and surveying their charges, knowing each by name, even when they number into the hundreds. Equally uniquely, it is a home for people to live and work in. The Cévennes national park – created 50 years ago – provides an over-arching protection to the area’s teeming wildlife and variety of plants, and is the only reserve in France to be, blissfully, free of any major roads. We gather chestnuts in season, careful to stick to those tumbled on to the paths, heeling open their spiky hulls to the nuts nestling inside like glossy cubs. Beech and chestnut thrive on certain slopes, the latter providing an important income and a source of vital nourishment to the peasant Cévenol over the centuries. There are Alpine touches, despite its closeness to the Mediterranean: pine and spruce in dark green swathes on the higher slopes, tumbling streams among the great boulders, and the odd solitary eagle eyeing you from the level of the peaks. Much of it is felted in dwarf holm oak, the evergreen and often impenetrable stuff of southern Europe, which turns metallic grey in poor weather, yet glitters beautifully under clear skies, simultaneously dark and resplendent, as difficult for a painter to capture as olive trees. Insular, tough-minded and Protestant, our home for the last 30 years has sharp granite and limestone hills that here and there stretch up out of deep valleys into proper mountains. I sometimes think of the Cévennes as the massive knuckles of a sleeping green giant. ![]()
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