Nov 29

Nov 29 Rural France - Cantal - Part 1

If there is one thing I really miss in these days of lockdown it is setting out somewhere foreign with nowhere particular to go - and just going…

There’s a French novel called Le Grand Meaulnes which has accrued cult status among young people of a more romantic bent – it’s about a youthful wanderer who, somewhere in rural France, comes across an estate where a party is being celebrated, he falls in love with a beautiful girl and spends the rest of his life trying to find both her and the magical party venue.

Alain Fournier’s novel is a muse upon many levels – the vagaries of lost youth, the untouchable ephemeral nature of lost love – but one rather prosaic thought has always bothered me about the story…

It’s this: how could anyone be stupid enough not to be able to find a place where they’d once been?

But I say this as a West Country person – I come from a peninsula that has marked confines of shorelines, escarpments and river systems. France is different. It is huge.

Nevertheless, having travelled extensively in that country for many years, the question about Le Grand Meaulnes has continued to bother me. Until now.

For I have been dallying deep inside the rural Auvergne – journeying through its most beautiful, mysterious, heady, sumptuous, bewitching, area called the Cantal. And now I know why the wanderer could never find his hallowed place…

The realisation began to dawn on me shortly after I’d arrived at Rodez regional airport – we’d driven to a village called Mourjou in the heart of the Cantal’s chestnut growing area where I’d met the writer Peter Graham – and it was the way he talked about our next destination that began to put me in mind of Le Grand Meaulnes.

“So you’re going to stay at Auberge de Concasty? It’s not far - near a neighbouring village just 20 minutes up the road,” said Peter.

I was trying to imagine a neighbouring village in the West Country being a whopping 20 minutes drive away as we meandered along ridges, down valleys, across hilltops, through forests, across streams, between hayfields, past isolated farms and the occasional petit chateau. The journey went on for so long that if we’d been travelling in most corners of the West Country, we’d have crossed county borders.

Peter regarded the excellent Auberge de Concasty as being in the next village - because it, more-or-less, was. And every kilometre of the way I became more convinced that this must really be the world of Le Grand Meaulne – so unutterably and mysteriously beautiful was the endless countryside.

I don’t get lost easily – years of walks writing has sharpened my sense of direction – and yet I’d have become instantly befuddled geographically speaking had I been dropped off in one of those endless country roads.

And, to be honest, I wouldn’t have minded in the least. I can hardly recall an afternoon of travelling in the heat when I was happier.

We’d been to Mourjou, by the way, to meet Peter and to learn about the Cantal’s once important chestnut industry. The village – whose name derives from an ancient term “Monjovis” meaning Mount of Joy – may only have 329 inhabitants, but it also boasts a splendid museum dedicated to the delicious and useful nut which once dominated the region’s economy.

There wasn’t much the locals couldn’t do with chestnuts or assorted bi-products. They made everything - from flour and bread out of the flesh of the dried and pounded chestnut - to roof-tiles from chestnut wood.

All this and much more did we learn before being introduced to the charming English writer who has lived in the village for longer than almost anyone else. Peter has written a book called Mourjou, The Life and Food of an Auvergne Village – which, having bought a copy for £5 off the internet, I can warmly recommend it.