Wednesday 7 October - Tech Valley

[Photos: Chapel of Saint Martin, Lovely roads, Gorges de la Fou, Arles sur Tech cloisters, pool ]

Time seems to have got away on us, and I am writing this on the 11^th. Our stay at Laroque has nearly come to an end – it seems unbelievable that we have spent nearly 3 weeks here, but the calendar says so. We are now well on the second half of our trip, but again it doesn’t feel that we have been away long at all.

Today we jumped in the car and went southwest to the Tech Valley again. We had deliberately only gone partway in last time, and so there was plenty left to see today. We started by showing Sandy and Lynette the Chateau d’Aubiry, and this time we went right up the drive and had a good look. Couldn’t see the “For Sale” sign, but I had found on the internet that it is on the market, with a pricetag between 20 and 30 million USD. We might have been interested, but the size was probably more than we could have coped with!

The plan was to do a loop up along the side of the valley, passing through Montferrer and Corsavy, before heading back down into the valley. Off we went up the valley, then took a right turn to travel up the small roads to Corsavy. Just before we got to it, we came across the lovely old chapel of St Martin – a beautiful Romanesque chapel in the process of being restored. The round slates on the roof were particularly nice.

Corsavy was an attractive little hilltown, though we had hoped to get a morning coffee here, and there was nothing open. Wandered up to the top, then back down through it. A couple of big communal wash basins as many towns still have. They always have a lovely aura of age about them, often helped by thick mosses taking advantage of the constant running water.

Next step was Montferrer, another hilltown a little further on along the very attractive narrow road. We are finding the countryside of France more attractive than that of Italy. It is generally cleaner, greener and better looked after. Also, there is less evidence of commercial activities like the huge areas given over to scruffy glasshouses in the Italian Riviera. Again, Montferrer failed to provide a hot coffee, but did have another interesting old church and graveyard, still in use. It was odd to see the little piles of gravel over the burial sites - though the dates above them were old, the piles looked very recent. Slightly disconcerting.

Les Gorges de la Fou was one of those nice travel finds that you weren’t expecting, but are really something special. We had read about them – a 1500m steel walkway up through a gorge – but the reality was quite impressive. The path up through the gorge was indeed a steel walkway, but with thr gorge 200m high, and the width down to 1 meter at times, the walk up was spectacular. We had to don safety helmets at the start, just as well as there were some good overhangs. The little stream below was full of fish. How they get up the frequent vertical waterfalls stumps us, maybe they breed above and come downwards. Every little pool had a resident fish or two. All the3 way up, we were under a giant wire and mesh catch net for falling rocks. At times the walkway had some good dents in the grid floor, where rocks had either got through the net, or predated it.

We had been intending to lunch later on, but there was a reasonable café at the entrance where we got some filled baguettes to keep us going.

Down again to the valley floor at Arles-sur-Tech, where we finally got our coffee at a perfect corner café with an excellent patisserie opposite where we picked up some accompaniments. We had seen signs for some mediaeval cloisters in an abbey, and Karen and I particularly like the feel of cloisters, so in we went for a look. We were not disappointed. Arles sur Tech also was supposed to have a Musee de Fer (iron) and we did find what looked like it might have been a recently-working ironworks, but we wonder if it has closed since our old book was written.

On the way home we diverted up to Palada, yet another interesting little hilltown with a nice old tower. Last stop was the modern art museum in Ceret. A little disappointing, in that a lot of the art was by artists we hadn’t heard of, or had barely heard of, and much was a bit gloomy in character.

It was pretty late by the time we got ourselves home to have some time around the pool, but still enough sun for some serious sunning.