The Village 1

The village is very old and mostly beautiful, French hobbit-world, as a visitor called it: stone houses with shutters and turrets - a few with lapped semi-circular slates on the roofs that look like gingerbread biscuit slates from a fairy tale cottage. In the lower village, the houses jostle and snuggle together, higgledy piggledy, tiny windy paths and lanes between them. Donkeys, sheep and horses sometimes graze in between the vegetable gardens and the woodstacks and the boundary between village and countryside is porous, vague. All around are hills, fields and woods.

I want to describe this place as accurately as I can, to do it justice. But this kind of breathless description, these romantic stories – stressed city people coming to peaceful calm countryside; moving from speed to slowness, from noise to silence; have become so over-done – A Year in Provence, Driving Over Lemons style - that now it’s hard to write anything that isn’t just another cliché.

A hundred years, two hundred, three hundred years ago, in the UK, most of the movement was the other way. My Irish grandfather who I never met and who came to Manchester as a young man, from a farm in the Mourne mountains, told a joke which had been popular at the time – 19th Century - when so many Irish people were leaving Ireland to work in English cities, a semi-racist joke, half against himself, which was passed down through the family. The story goes that Pat and Mick come to the city from the farm and are so amazed by the big buildings and the traffic that they walk about all day with their mouths so wide open in astonishment that children throw horsedung into them. R and me walk around this place like Pat and Mick, gob-smacked and gobs open. There’s plenty of horse dung around here too - unlike Manchester today – but, and this is where the idyllic country village story begins to slip a bit, there are no children here to throw it in our mouths.

The village is quiet partly because it is so depopulated. The railway that used to come here from the town is gone. The Auberge closed a few years ago and still hasn’t been sold. Many of the houses are second homes, empty most of the year. There are many houses for sale, that have been for sale for years and years. The school has closed because there are hardly any children and so the few that there are are bussed to a nearby, bigger village.

The younger people here all move away – to town and cities – for work, just as my grandfather did: the same process, the same direction, from farm to street, from rural to urban. Last week we went to a brilliant photographic exhibition by Yann Arthus-Bertrand called Bestiaux, in the Jacques Chirac musèe in Sarran. This exhibition celebrates and records farm animals – pigs, sheep, cows, horses, goats – alongside the farmers who care for them, who produce the food that we eat and care for the land that we love to look at. One of the statistics set out in the exhibition was that in 1955 69.1% of the world's population lived and worked on the land but by 2005 the figure was 51.4 % and in 2050 the rural population will be 31.4%.

The people who move here, to this village, who replace the people who move out, who do up the houses, who stop them falling into ruin, are either second-homers, or older people – French, English, German, Dutch.

In the first month were were here, we were walking down the village street which was so quiet it felt deserted. A car came round the corner, stopped and a woman we had met before leaned out.


‘Are you settling in?’ She said, kindly. ‘We must get together when things have calmed down.’


As she drove away, I thought if things calm down any more, we’ll all be in the cimetière and I wondered if this quietness, which feels interesting and new, - so un-cityish – will drive me up the beautiful stone walls by the time the year is over.