OUR VILLAGE, Olargues, is officially classified Un des Plus Beaux Villages de France, which I suppose I'd better get 2011 off to a charitable start by translating for those still overcome by festive season torpor as One of the Most Beautiful Villages of France. There are only about 160 Most Beautiful Villages in all France, so I suppose it's a privilege to live in of them.
OUR VILLAGE, Olargues, is officially classified Un des Plus Beaux Villages de France, which I suppose I'd better get 2011 off to a charitable start by translating for those still overcome by festive season torpor as One of the Most Beautiful Villages of France. There are only about 160 Most Beautiful Villages in all France, so I suppose it's a privilege to live in of them.
The title isn't automatic, and you can't award it to yourself. A national association runs it. Any village can apply for the title, which they call le label, but requirements are strict. You have to have a humming community life as well as historically important monuments, and if you can stir a picturesque setting into this mix then you might persuade the association's inspectors to award you membership. I probably oughtn't to mention that our village maire sits on the general committee, and one of the village councillors has been appointed to the aesthetic standards sub-committee for life. So it looks as if our village's title is secure.
Historically important monuments? We've got three. Lastly - we'll do this in reverse order - there's the village church organ. Runner-up, there's the 12th-century bridge, called Le Pont du Diable, the devil's bridge. In first place, and this where this month's story really starts, there's the village tower.
The old village was built on the sunny southern slopes of a hill, a bluff of a rock so hard that the river has been obliged to run round it in almost a complete circle, making an easily defensible site. On top of this rock local magnates in the Dark Ages and early medieval times built a fortress, not a tremendously impressive one because our remote valley doesn't really lead anywhere important, so there never has been very much to guard. But build it they did, the Comte of This and the Seigneur of That, who were usually cadet branches of the great Languedoc families sent into the sticks to cow the peasants into paying their tithes on time.
In its heyday the château complex covered the flattish area on top of the rock It consisted of many buildings, dwelling-houses, stores, cellars, barracks, and a large chapel with an adjoining bell tower. Where necessary - part of the parent rock falls away sheer to the river below - there was a curtain wall, with a protected walkway on top. Below the wall and stretching down the slope beyond, the less favoured built shacks and bothies, and I suppose in times of danger were admitted for safety inside the château precinct.
In time the ruling feudal families lost their sway and eventually the whole château fell down, ably helped by those villagers who saw in its collapse a ready supply of good building stone to turn their shacks and bothies into something more permanent. The present old village is the result.
One building escaped the collapse: the tower, which was originally flat-topped. The present pyramid top is a later addition. This tower has become a sort of trade-mark of the village, so that every time its picture appears it ought to have the symbol ™ beside it, and it's probably the clincher for The Most Beautiful Village award.
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THEY'RE LOOKING after it. The château complex, formerly little more than a few ruined walls, has been excavated over the past few summers by young people attached to a European scheme called Concordia. Contractors have been brought in to reinforce and stabilise the areas that have already given up their archaeological secrets. Without trying to reconstruct the original château, they're making it very attractive tourist venue, with suggestions of what the original layout was. A guide for visitors has been put together. My wife Josephine was given the task of translating it into English.
I went up there the other day. I hadn't climbed the winding path up through the village for years. I started at the foot of the Escalier de la Commanderie (HQ stairway), one of the more unusual features of the village: a six-flight vaulted stairway that takes you through the heart of the old village. You come out in front of the 17th-century church, not a very splendid place built with stone from the château ruins, maybe from the chapel it replaced. The bells, electrically operated from the church, are still housed in the topmost chamber of the tower. A narrow lane winds up beyond the church and degenerates into a rocky track which takes you to the foot of the tower.
I've only ever been inside the tower once. You climb it by means of a spiral staircase built into the western angle. The views from the top are spectacular: nothing is hidden, except by the wall of mountains to the north and the lesser hills to the south. Whatever marauding bands came this way in medieval times could hardly have arrived unseen.
At the time of my sole visit I was uneasy and impatient. I'd been detailed to accompany and interpret for a group of Scottish schoolchildren. They were very docile, polite and receptive kids, as I remember, but I was in a stew. It was about ten minutes to four. We clambered up the spiral stair and reached the bell chamber. Two bells were clamped on rockers between enormous beams, with rotting fabric-wrapped electric wiring from another century spider-webbing round antiquated electric motors. The larger bell, with the deeper note, sounded - and still sounds - the hours and half-hours, clanging peals that echo up and down the valley. The smaller was exclusively for church use.
I'd recently been reading Dorothy L. Sayers' The Nine Tailors, a detective story in which a victim is done to death by lashing him to a pillar in a belfry. The volume, pitch and vibrations of the bells shatter his eardrums, burst blood-vessels in his head and make short work of him.
Would those kids hurry? They would not. Four o'clock neared. As in so many belfries hereabouts, the hour is struck twice, in case you missed it first time. How many strokes would it need to split those Scottish eardrums? Mine too, while they were at it? The kids milled about the belfry, marvelling at the antiquity of the mechanisms, tapping at the bells with fingernails, trying to decipher the inscriptions on them, peering at the views through the lancet windows . . .
. . . we made it, but only just. I was the last to leave, frantically urging the kids down the spiral stair before blame for premature deafness could be laid at my door. The four-o'clock mechanism was just whirring into life as I closed the bell-chamber door behind me and started down the spiral stair.
Phew.
