Of Rivers, Baguettes and Billabongs. Reg Egan

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      Today is to be bastide day but prior to the bastides there is this walk — a before breakfast walk.

      The Hostellerie is virtually on the banks of the Ouysse River and I wanted to walk to Château Belcastel which is on a cliff about a kilometre from our hotel. You can go straight up the hill at the back of the hotel but my God it is steep; excellent for the heart no doubt, but hard on the muscles. There is an alternate route, the D road that comes in from Souillac, where the gradient is perfect, the surface is excellent and there are views from every bend, and in addition there are limestone cliffs, and oak forests and sky and clouds, but the distance is about four kilometres.

      It took me a while to make a decision standing there by the fast running Ouysse. I had climbed that knee-trembler of a hill last year so…the beautifully graded road with the views from every bend was the sensible choice and I would take the short cut back down the hill on my return journey.

      I got to the château eventually and was greeted vociferously by the dog — a frighteningly savage dog which challenged me with its aggressive pose and deep-throated growls. The next thing I noticed, however, was that its tail was wagging and its eyes were smiling. So, we became companions, and as I walked to the gates of the château and peered through, it too poked its head between the wrought iron uprights as if seeing the château and grounds for the first time. A pleasant place — a place worth the walk.

      I turned and began my return journey and it trotted along with me. I admonished it and told it in my best French to retournee to le château. It pretended not to understand no matter how I rephrased or repeated my reprimands. Alright, it could walk with me for part of the return journey while I searched for the appropriate French terms.

      We got to the first corner but still it cantered at my side. There was a small field of wheat, excellent wheat in almost full ear, and a stone wall to sit on and so I sat and it lay. How pleasant to relax here on a chilly morning with the sun every now and again puncturing a golden shaft through the clouds. How pleasant to be in France in the spring in the Valley of the Dordogne with a French chien by your side. And the quiet — no cars, no loud music, not even church bells. And there was no hurry.

      That boy I mentioned earlier who was not me, but a boy I knew; when he was seven or eight, or thereabouts, he too sat one winter’s afternoon but not on a stone wall, he sat on the fallen, curly dried bark of a large, old white gum, and he sat there for quite a while. It was after school and he was on his way up to the “Far Hill” to help his father with the digging and bagging of the family’s potato crop. His job was to pick up the large potatoes and put them in one bag and then to pick up the “chats”, the small potatoes, and put them in a drum to be boiled up and fed to the pigs. This job did not appeal to him.

      On his way from the house to the potatoes he began to think yet again about “the problem” which had been bothering him for quite some time. And the problem was this — “How could the world exist before he came into existence?” Surely nothing existed before he was there to see it and listen to it. The world, this bush, this dear old gum tree on a turn in the sledge track, those peppermint gums, that bracken, those gentle clumsy wallabies that he saw on days of mist and light rain, they must have all come into existence when he did. It was inconceivable that they could exist when he did not; but then his mother, and indeed his father too, they had somehow existed when he had not. But if you couldn’t see them, how could it be?

      He took a twig and broke it into small pieces. He pulled down a tall piece of bracken that had grown through the rough mulch of bark and he felt the soft furriness of the new crook-like shoot. He sat for some time — he may even have dozed.

      Then suddenly he got up and made his way along the winding sledge track to the top of the hill. The soil up here was deep and of a rich chocolate colour, and just near a smoking, burning stump he saw a row of yellow-white potatoes neatly laid out and his father putting his foot on a long-handled fork which he then left in the ground. There were full bags of potatoes standing in two more rows and near the edge of the paddock the grey horse Dodger stood by the sledge with a nosebag slung loosely over his neck.

      “Where in the name of God have you been?” his father said, as he approached. The boy felt a pang of fear dart through and around his stomach, but he said nothing, he just stood there looking at his father. His mother would understand if he told her why he had been delayed, but not his father. The boy remained mute.

      “Where the hell have you been?” his father reiterated, pulling his watch out of his pocket and looking at it. The boy hung his head.

      “Better get on with it then,” the father said, and as the boy scurried over towards the bucket the father put his watch back in his pocket, looked to the west at the setting sun and sighed and shook his head, he shrugged his shoulders, resumed his digging and, with a quick deft action, turned out all the potatoes from under the next bush.

      I got up and the dog did too. Desperately I said, “Allez, vite…allez à la…non, le château.” My dog looked alarmed and slunk away. My French had come to my rescue. I continued on my downhill short cut.

      * * * *

      Bastides or bastide towns were a new type of town built mainly in the thirteenth and fourteen century, at the end of the Middle Ages. Although we tend to associate them with France they were also built in England, especially in Wales.

      The term bastide was derived from the Latin bastida which gave rise in French to the word bâtir : to build. Edward 1 was king of England from 1272-1307 and also of the duchy of Gascony and he was the builder par excellence of bastides, but the French also built them.

      And you might ask in an aside how it was that kings of England could also be kings in parts of France at a time when the only method of getting from one country to the other was by way of a rather small and rather unreliable sailing boat, and, once there, the only method of continuing your progress was by horse. What an impossible arrangement, but there it was. And, furthermore, you fought battles in France to hang on to your overseas domains and you somehow (part of the time) gained the allegiance of your French subjects.

      Freda White has a small and very informative chapter on bastides and points out that the redoubtable Edward 1 built most of these defensive villages south of the Dordogne but in a play for more land or more security for his Gascon holdings, he ventured into the Dordogne proper. He was, I think, a little like modern warmongers who talk “defensive” weaponry, when it is plainly offensive. We are in the era of euphemisms, thanks to Hitler and his propaganda and then to his imitators of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Modern euphemisms are just as deadly as some of Göebbells’ propaganda, but they are more discreetly couched.

      Domme had figured prominently in our pre-trip research so Domme the bastide was next on the list. It was not built by the English incidentally but by the brave Frenchman Phillip the Bold. Domme is a natural fortress town with a cliff giving protection on one side and the usual bastide planning and defensive layout and buildings on the other three.

      You enter Domme through the solid stone gate at the foot of the village and you walk up through old houses and shops to the church at the top, and you continue on to the cliff. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about the boring tourism of the shops on the way up the hill, and when you get to the view from under the shade of the trees (chestnut trees, I believe) you may reflect that it is good but hardly more, but when you take the road to your left and come back down the hill the scene changes. You then walk through some old and very lovely houses