France 2013 Chapter 22

 

……..And still the enervating heat persists! Driving through Eauze one of the days, we saw an electronic notice-board giving the day, date, time and the temperature and on that day it was recording 36 degrees. I think it may have been a few degrees out, but it was definitely between 30 and 33 dergrees.

On Monday we thought that it may well be slightly cooler and it would be worthwhile to go out somewhere. We were later proved to have no future with the Met. Office but before that we saw a little bit more of the country. At some time during the past few months, and after I had decided to make my collection of photographs of pigeon-lofts, I had noticed what I thought was a loft on a farm not far from Ordan –Larroque, a small village on the way to Auch, so we set off to see if I had been right. Although not as close to the village as I had thought, we eventually found the loft and it was a satisfyingly good example. As we had approached the spot via the main road to Auch (and Toulouse) which is a relatively busy road with plenty of trucks, we thought it would be nicer to find and alternative route home again, which how we found ourselves in Biran. By the time we got there, it was already into the ‘lunch-and-siesta’ time and the village was, to all intents, completely deserted. I think I may have heard a radio or perhaps a television from behind a partly open shutter but otherwise all was silent. By now, too, it was extremely hot but the heat could have been  exaggerated by our very hot little car. We parked in a tiny spot of shade and set off to see what the village had to offer – and were pleasantly surprised.

Standing on a knoll at the end of the village was an ancient ‘motte-and-bailey’ type of fortified tower. A motte and bailey fort was a fortified building erected on a small hillock, often man-made, and surrounded by a wooden palisade fence. Sadly we could find no information about the fort which has been allowed to fall into disrepair, but I am sure it is really old, possibly Roman.

The village church also has a Roman look to it with four sturdy pillars supporting the portico over the entrance, which has wonderful stone carvings above the door. The inner door had had a window let into it and when we peered through this we could see the most stunning stone carving on the retable – a framed altarpiece raised slightly above the back of the altar. Had we wished to wait until 3pm, we could have contacted someone who bring the key and let us in but by then the heat had killed all desire to sight-see any more and we returned home.

The next day the entertainment came to us, in a manner of speaking. The grass in the field behind this house, between us and the house behind, has been growing longer and longer over the past few months and I have been wondering if, one day, I would meet a snake when I went out to hang the washing on the line. So we were pleased when a farmer arrived in his tractor, to cut the grass. The following day he came again with an elaborate machine which tossed the grass around. This he repeated on the day following that. Two days after his last visit he arrived in a much bigger tractor with a huge contraption attached to it to make round hay bales. It was fascinating to watch, at close range, how the machine gathered up all the wispy bits of grass and rolled them into a 200 kg bale, and then popped it out on to the ground like a hen laying an egg! So for a few hours, we had our very own hay bales (almost) before he came and loaded them up and took them away for storage.

Apart from that, things have been fairly quiet on the home front – it has just been too, too hot.