Lodève, Larzac, Escandorgue

They travelled by bus and train, westwards through Provence, through flash floods and electrical storms. In Arles they met a French government official who drove them to Lodève in Languedoc. He told them that if they presented themselves at his hôtel in a week's time he would take them on with him to Bordeaux. The skies had cleared, they were not due in England for another two weeks and so they set off on a short walking tour.

This is the region where the causses, high limestone plateaux, rise a thousand feet above the coastal plain. In places the cliffs drop spectacularly hundreds of feet. Lodève stands at the foot of one of the passes, then a narrow country road, now the busy RN 9. It is still a fine ascent, though with such traffic, hardly pleasant on foot. In those days you could pass a tranquil day climbing steadily between towering formations of rock, until you could see the Mediterranean shining behind you, thirty miles to the south. The Tremaines spent the night at the small town of Le Caylar where they bought broad-brimmed shepherds' hats. The next morning they left the road and headed off north east across the Causse de Larzac, carrying two litres of water each.

These are some of the emptiest spaces in France. There are fewer people here now than there were a hundred years ago. Dusty tracks, unmarked on the best of maps, wind across expanses of heather, gorse and box. Deserted farms and hamlets sit in hollows of surprising greenness where small pastures are divided by ancient dry-stone walls and the paths between them, flanked by tall blackberry bushes, wild roses and oaks, have an English intimacy. But these soon give way to the emptiness again.

Towards the end of the day the Tremaines came across the Dolmen de la Prunarède, a prehistoric burial chamber. Then, only several yards further on, they found themselves standing above a deep gorge carved through the rock by the river Vis.

 

(Ian McEwan. Black Dogs, 1992. Vintage, pp. 138-9)