HISTORY OF THE HOUSE AND AREA
(Extract from the extensive Le Mas du Coq Housebook, available on arrival)
The large building across the road was a monastery which gave its name to St Roman. Saint Roman, not the best known of saints, was a Greek Vth century church acolyte whose prayers for a beautiful voice to glorify the Lord were answered and is the patron saint of church singers. We think our building was the home of what would have been the lay farmer who managed the farm estate. The building is probably around 250 years old, built from the ‘galets’, the round stones which would have been brought up from the river bed by horse and cart. In the South of France a ‘Mas’ is anything from a substantial house to a chateau.
The last owner but one still kept pigs and chickens in living memory. The ground floor has never before been lived in by humans. The dining room was a stable, with rings on the walls (thank you builders, where are they?), open to the sky, and a cobbled floor. We created the third bedroom and bathroom from an ‘atelier’ or workshop, and a wine store, and we refer to it as the ‘atelier bedroom and bathroom’. Where the downstairs kitchen is now was once the ‘buanderie’, a washing area, which we believe was part of the silk-making process. The white mulberry grows like a weed here, imported from China to support the French silk-making industry. The barn which is now the salon and ‘the barn bedroom’ would have been used to spread the silkworms over the leaves, heating the barn to speed up the silk-creating process. Unfortunately a disease destroyed the industry, and by the time one Docteur Louis Pasteur had been persuaded to find a cure, Italy and China had captured the market.
Upstairs, all the old keys hanging on the East wall of the salon were recovered from the property, sadly from doors too far gone to recycle. The single working key is is in the old door nearby, which used to be the main entrance. You can see the traces of a staircase which came down below the Coq to the gate. The stone steps were salvaged and appear as flagstones around the garden and between salon and dining room.
In the garden, it seems the small hill we are on is a drumlin formed in the ice age when the glacier ground everything in its path. Every stone you see in the rockeries and around, the galets and the stratal deposit, came from the tight-packed terrain from which the pool was scooped. The main gardening tool has been the pickaxe! The large tree which shades the barbecue area is a micocoulier (no English translation). In former times its wood was prized because it bent easily when cut, but then set hard in its new form, being used for agricultural tools in particular. The fork hanging in the salon is an example.
You will see many wells around the area. Ours has been revived and feeds from our gutters and now serves the garden – we hope throughout the year.
Once you are away from the vineyards and cultivated areas (for example across the road you see from the balcony) you enter the ‘garrigue’, the rocky hillsides of the Cevennes, covered in Mediterranean oaks, wild olives, juniper and thyme bushes and inhabited mainly by wild boar. In the winter the hunters go out on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays to hunt boar and virtually anything that flies...................
The region is a focal point of the centuries of strife between the French Catholics and Protestant (Huguenot) sects (qv Les Camisards, the Cathars, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes). Every village has its ‘temple’ as well as its church, and the ‘temple’ in Anduze is one of the biggest in France. Protestants could not be buried in a churchyard: you will see some well-kept tombs beyond the pool, which we hope means that the land will never be built on!
Robert Louis Stevenson bid a tearful adieu to his sometime wayward donkey Modestine (Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes 1897) at St Jean du Gard, above Anduze. ‘Her faults were those of her race and sex: her virtues were her own.’
Nearer the present day, the resistance was active against the German occupation, hiding up in the bleak ‘maquis’ of the upper Cevennes. Several memorials testify to local lives sacrificed. The memorial on the right before you get to La Madeleine is visited by a procession of schoolchildren who walk all the way from Anduze to lay wreathes there on Armistice Day. A different twist to the usual condemnation of the Germans can be seen on a memorial on the road to Barre in the Cevennes. This records the deaths, not only of French members of the Resistance, but also their German, Spanish and Russian colleagues in political refuge in the Cevennes, who fought ‘ the Fascist oppressors and their Vichy collaborators’.
From the balcony, the vineyards you survey belong to the co-operative of Les Vignerons de Tornac, which you pass on the way to Anduze. We patronise it regularly, especially for its Merlot, Sauvignon and rosé. Le ‘bib’, (le Bag in Box) is great value. See more details in loose page.
We are working on a better list of flora and fauna. For now, the more unusual birds you can see are: the redstart, frequently on the balcony and in the garden, the hoopoe – seen in the village, the african roller, seen on the way to Lézan, the hawfinch, the bee-eater, the golden oriole, the kite, and memorably in August 2008, two soaring golden eagles down from the Cevennes. The clouds of birds whirling in the vinyards and settling on the overhead cables are fieldfares. Nightingales and the Scop’s owl are very audible in season.
We have much more to learn in this wonderful part of the world, and we hope you will enjoy sharing it with us. |
