Tag Archives: chateau de pionsat

Thursday 13th December 2012 – I wish I could remember …

… who it was who rang me at 17:00 today. I would give them a big round of applause. For at 17:00 I should have been at Marianne’s helping her move a bed, but instead I was totally flat out – crashed out on the sofa. I do remember having the most vague and incomprehensible discussion with someone while I was trying my very best to wake up. I wonder what the other party must have made of it.

This morning I had the usual couple of hours on the radio programme that I’m trying to write, and then I went out to empty Caliburn seeing as I had this bed to move. But tidying up isn’t my strongpoint as you know and it didn’t quite work out how it should have done. I ended up leaving the false floor in the van and putting a pile of stuff underneath it.

Pascal, Marianne’s son, and I dropped off a few things around Pionsat and then went to the Chateau to pick up this bed. We were also treated to some exciting news – while the Water Board was digging in the chateau yard to lay a new water pipe, part of the yard collapsed and some of their equipment fell into a long-lost subterranean crypt of some description. Of course, Marianne is in her element, or she would be if she were feeling better, because she’s been ill too.

While I was there, I told her the news about Bill, and seeing as how she knows her way around French administration and isn’t easily cowed, I set her a task to prove that she is worthy – namely, to make the necessary enquiries.

A brief stop at the Intermarché came next. While I was emptying Caliburn, the black cat came around again. Once more, it let me stroke it and pick it up. Clearly starving, the poor thing, and so I bought a box of Munchies and next time I see it I shall give it a handful. That’s me well and truly hooked, isn’t it?

We had our little social night this evening too, and having made a lucky find in a Charity Shop in Stockton Heath when I was in the UK, I taught a group of French citizens how to play Snakes and Ladders.

Yes  French people playing Snakes and Ladders. There’s nothing like a bit of globalisation, is there? Whatever next? Cricket, maybe.

Wednesday 15th August 2012 – I WITNESSED A CALAMITY TODAY!

I mentioned yesterday that I was technicianing for Marianne this morning.

rick the trailer guy cello bussieres puy de dome franceAnd so I was. We were doing the pot d’acceuil at Bussieres for the tourists this morning.

The weather was fine and so they decided to hold it outside, even though there was a fair wind blowing.

Music was provided by Rick the Belgian trailer guy on the ‘cello and a girl friend of his on accordion. I really enjoy listening to those two playing and indeed they did not disappoint this morning – that is, until the tragedy occurred.

Halfway through the proceedings they stopped for a breather. Rick stood his ‘cello on the tripod and went over to chat to someone he knew.

rick the trailer guy cello bussieres puy de dome franceJust at that very moment a violent gust of wind picked up his ‘cello, hurled it down the street and smashed it into a stone wall.

And “smashed” was the appropriate word too.

35 years he’s had that ‘cello. He was devastated, and so were all of us. It’s an awful thing to happen to someone.

I’ve had my bass guitar for that length of time and I know how I would feel if something were to happen to it.

I felt really sorry for Rick.

rick the trailer guy cello bussieres fete du village  puy de dome franceAll of that put rather a damper on the proceedings.

It’s really hard to focus and have a good time when you’ve been the witness to a personal tragedy such as this.

What made matters worse was that the event was very poorly attended. I’m not sure what had happened to all of the publicity but it certainly didn’t reach the hands of the people whom it was intended to reach

So after that tragedy we went into Pionsat for the kermesse – or more to the point, for the midday meal at the kermesse. Marianne had reserved a table for her and some friends and I took along my butties because of course you won’t find anything there that I might be able to eat.

durat pionsat puy de dome franceIt comes as a huge surprise to most people when you tell them that the site that they know today as Pionsat is not in fact the original site of the town.

I’m standing roughly where the original site of the town might have been, looking back at the present site of Pionsat with the zoom lens on my camera

We are about one kilometre south of the present site, at a lieu-dit or hamlet known as Durat,

durat pionsat puy de dome franceThere was said to be an early medieval fortress here at Durat, but no-one is quite sure where.

they say that the fortress has been completely dismantled and that nothing whatever remains – and that they are surprised by this.

This mound here is my best guess, although there is nothing that has ever been found to prove it.

durat pionsat puy de dome franceRemember that building that we saw just now on what might have been the castle mound?

I went for a little probe around and I noticed this. Of course, there is nothing whatever to suggest that this is any part of the original fortress, even if the fortress had been built of stone, but it is certainly significant.

People have this strange idea about castles being made out of stone – like in the film The Vikings starring Kirk Douglas.

That is clearly an anachronism.

Stone-built castles wouldn’t come onto the scene for another 100 years. Wood would have been the more usual building material round about this time. A wood castle “completely disappearing” wouldn’t be too much of a surprise

durat pionsat puy de dome franceOn our way out to Durat we passed another significant Pionsat landmark.

This concerns a citizen of Pionsat, one Désiré Chaffraix, who left the town to go to seek his fortune in the USA.

And having made his pile (some say in the brothels of New Orleans but no-one has ever dared put that in writing), he returned home round about the turn of the 20th Century.

He fancied himself as a “man of the people” and as there was an agricultural recession in the area at the time, he used his fortune to employ the locals to build three huge mansions.

This was one of the earliest make-work projects for the unemployed, but there seems to be little doubt that he was doing it for a rather sinister purpose.

He had the idea that he would lead some kind of new political movement in the region, and used these projects as a means of “encouraging” the locals to vote for him

Of course the locals took his money and started to work on his project, but at the next round of elections, the perfidious locals voted for his opponent.

In an evident fit of pique, Chaffraix stopped the construction, cut off the funds and moved away. And left behind three magnificent but only half-finished stately mansions.

And here they stand, even today, like the Maison Durat which is one of these three unfinished tributes to the ambitions of Désiré Chaffraix.

chateau de pionsat puy de dome franceOn our way back into town we were treated by Marianne to a guided tour of the Chateau de Pionsat.

It’s not been possible to visit the chateau for a number of years now because it’s been undergoing a programme of major renovation, so we wre quite lucky.

And Marianne was quite pleased too. The chateau is her chou-chou and she delights in having the opportunity to show people around her celebrated pile.

chateau de pionsat puy de dome franceNot that there’s as much to see of it as there would have been 300 years ago, that’s for sure.

You only have to look at the dressed stone used in some of the most banal buildings in Pionsat dating from the 19th Century to know where much of it has gone.

It’s actually in two parts – a Medieval part that dates from the time of the 100 Years War and was built on the instructions of Charles V as a barrier to marauding English troops from the Aquitaine, and the second part is from a couple of centuries later.

After the Revolution it fell into disrepair but was later listed as a Historic Monument and is now slowly being pieced together.

We finished everything by about 19:30 and I came home.

Completely worn out and it’s supposed to be a bank holiday – a day of rest – too.

But at least we had a pile of rain this evening, and the garden didn’t half need it;.

And I really do feel sorry for Rick the Trailer Guy and his cello.

Monday 2nd April 2012 – Coming back …

… from the Anglo-French group tonight, I noticed in my rear-view mirror just how nicely Pionsat was looking this evening.

pionsat puy de dome franceThere’s a certain spot near the old Roman Road up here where there’s a good view down into the valley and I’ve had one or two decent photos from there.

In case you are wondering, which I’m sure that you are, although I live 5 or 6 kms from Pionsat there’s a height difference of about 140 metres – Pionsat being at about 530 metres and me being at 667 metres – and so just here at this spot there must be 120 metres of difference.

What caught my eye, and if you look very carefully to the left of centre, is the “tent” that is covering the exposed roof of of the Medieval chateau in the centre of the town. It’s being replaced at the moment and so they have this plastic tarpaulin thing over the top. There are a few lights burning away underneath the tarpaulin, and the whole thing looked from here as if it was some kind of Chinese lantern. It really was bizarre.

So this morning I was recording radio programmes again, and then I came home and did some gardening for the rest of the day. I had another fire of all of the dried weeds and so on, and then went round pulling up yet more to add to the conflagration. This place is looking quite a bit different from a couple of months ago.

I’ve also planted the new potatoes. They are where they should be for now, and I’ll be intrigued to see what they might do. They are churning up the large bed that I laid out this year – the one that will eventually be the home of the fruit bushes. I also wasted a few surplus watts of energy on attacking the hole that I’m trying to drill through the wall. but another half hour and I reckon that I’ve advanced maybe a millimetre. there’s something not quite right about this.

All of the plants that I’ve been buying these last couple of weeks – they are now in a plastic box that has about 20mm of water in it – to give them all a good soaking before I plant them this week.

But never mind the exertions – I stopped for lunch at about 14:30, had a sandwich and a coffee, and the next thing that I remember was that it was 16:05. All of this work is taking it out of me.

Tuesday 14th June 2011 – I LEFT YOU …

… last night as I was pulling up outside the Library at Cambridge University.

Today, I was battling, and battling unsuccessfully as you might expect, with one of the most classic examples of incestuous Academia that you would ever have the misfortune to meet.

There’s a really big car park at the University Library, as I knew. What I didn’t know is that it’s locked during closing hours. Parking in the street outside is controlled during working hours, but it’s a nice wide verge with plenty of free spaces and in a quiet area.

The plan would be therefore that I would park up for the night outside in the street, wake up really early, and be queueing in Caliburn at the gate to the car park when they came to unlock it.

strawberry moose cambridge university library UKHere’s Strawberry Moose queueing up to enter the library.

He was quite keen to teach a couple of courses at the University until I explained to him that the word is Lecturers, not Lechers.

Rather like the time that he tried to charter a plane to come home from Canada – but changed his mind when they told him that it was spelt L-E-A-Rjet.

So in I walked to the University library.

And I had a reason to be here too. Someone in Pionsat had heard of a story that an Eton teacher by the name of William Johnson Cory had visited the Auvergne and made a reference to the Chateau de Pionsat in one of his letters.

Before setting out, I had done some research into the aforementioned and discovered that on his death in 1892 he had bequeathed his letters to the Cambridge University library.

So here I had come to read them.

But I was failing to take into account the incestuous nature of Academia at the UK’s top-drawer University.

Yes, his papers are here. But no, I can’t see them.
“Why not?”
“Are you from the University?”
“No I’m not”
“Well, you need to have a letter from someone connected with the University validating your research project”
“But I’ve just come from France – I don’t know anyone here.”
“Well we can’t let you consult our papers until a researcher connected with our own University has had the opportunity to examine them”
“You mean that no-one from the University has examined them yet?”
“That’s right”
“And they’ve been here since 1892?”
“Yes”.

No wonder that mainstream Academia has such a poor reputation when the Universities are prepared to sit upon piles of unrecorded papers until the cows come home rather than let researchers from outside their own sphere of control have a peek.

Who knows WHAT treasures these Universities might be sitting on? When you read in some of these journals things like “a rare 7th-Century poem by Caedmon has just been discovered in an Oxbridge Library” you can understand why, now.

But I had nothing better to do and nowhere else to go, so I raided the University library just the same, seeing as I was in.

And here I hit the jackpot.

On the shelves was an original version of all of the volumes of Sir Walter Raleigh (not him, the other one)’s The War in the Air – totally original and un-defaced, even with all of the maps and plates. And I’ve never seen that before.

This was the book commissioned by the British Government as the Official History of the Royal Flying Corps (later the RAF) from its inception until the end of World War i.

I’ve been trying to find a copy of all of the volumes but the only ones that I have ever seen have had their maps and photograph plates removed, and the books are of much less interest without those.

But here I was in my element.

Later that evening I went for a drive to the outskirts of town where I cooked a meal (not practical to do that in the street right outside the Library) in a layby.

Having eaten, I then went on to a Motorway Service Area on the M10 – quite a drive and after all of that, the internet was down.

So I came back to my my spec outside the Library and had an early night.

Monday 24th May 2010 – There were about 15 of us …

… including Clotilde and Heidi from the Conversation Group, who went for this tramp in the woods today. Unfortunately the tramp got away but never mind – we’ll get him next time.

coal mine abandoned pithead winding gear gouttieres puy de dome franceFirst place we were taken to was deep in the woods at the back of Gouttieres, and here we uncovered some old machinery.

It is in fact some old pithead winding gear – a winding frame of sorts and a steam engine to power it – and dates from the turn of the 20th Century when this mine-shaft was sunk to exploit the coal seam here.

St Eloy les Mines was well-known for its coal mines, as I have said many times in the past and as the quest for fuel intensified at the end of the 19th Century they started to sink shafts at the peripheral edges of the valley.

coal mine abandoned pithead winding gear gouttieres puy de dome franceThey struck a good, profitable seam at Youx and Montjoie and so they followed it right through to the edge of the plateau where the valley opens out into the valley of the Sioule.

Early indications were promising and several mines were sunk in the area between Gouttieres and Lapeize, including this site in the forest at the back of Gouttieres. They had high hopes for the area – even going to the lengths of making a huge goods yard at the railway station at Gouttieres for the trans-shipment of the mined coal.

A great deal of investment was made in the area, not just with the mine installations themselves but even dividing up farmland into tiny plots for housing for the workers, but all hopes were dashed as the coal quite literally turned to dust.

puits michelin abandoned coal mine lapeize gouttieres puy de dome franceNot one of the pits that were sunk lasted more than a handful of years. It was quickly discovered that the reserves were nothing like as prolific as everyone was expecting and there was insufficient coal to make the proposition an economic one.

Even the massive Puits Michelin at Lapeize, the remains of which can be seen in this photograph, lasted no more than 5 years. The huge area that was set aside for a slag heap rose to no more than about 20 feet high.

surface coal seam lapeize gouttieres puy de dome franceWe visited the site of 3 or 4 mines but the highlight of the visit, from one point of view at least, was finding the final outcrop of surface coal.

Here, we are probably no more than 300 metres from the Puits Michelin and this is where the coal seam ends. It just curves upwards to the surface and that is that. No wonder that it wasn’t possible to make an economic proposition of coal-mining in the area with the coal seam petering out like this.

A small amount of open-cast mining was carried out here but it was done in a very desultory, half-hearted fasion and never amounted to very much at all.

After a stop for iced water we went to look at the quarries at Lapeize.

gres de lapeize quarry puy de dome franceThe area is famous for the “Grès de Lapeize” – a hard silty millstone grit type of rock with a close affinity to sandstone and there are 5 major outcrops in the Lapeize area.

These have been quarried for centuries, if not millennia, and many important buildings in the area, including the Chateau de Pionsat, are made from the stone.

They closed down just prior to World War II but some kind of desultory attempt was made to restart them but it was doomed to failure. But in 1970 one of the quarries was bought (for a pittance) by a man from St Georges de Mons who was going to build a hotel there and he needed the stone.

old car american GMC world war II lorry  side valve - cylinder gres de lapeize quarry puy de dome franceNow Krys told me to look out for fossils (I suppose she meant something other than my fellow walkers)  but never mind that – the guy who bought the quarry took a wartime American GMC truck – 6-cylinder petrol sidevalve – into the quarry. And people say that it was fitted with a mechanical crane to scoop up the rock.

And one day he simply stopped coming and his truck is still there.

So I had a good nosy around it. It’s been robbed of many parts but its major components are still there. And it’s not a mechanical bucket on the back, it’s a mechanical prodder-type of ram-type of drill for breaking the stone off the wall and into manageable chunks.

Still, hottest day of the year so far – 34.5 degrees and the heat exchanger went off the scale – the first time since 6th August last year.

However it got off to a bad start. Being a Bank Holiday I was planning on a lie-in but not one but two phone calls shortly after 09:00 knackered that idea.

And it’s still warm now. It reached over 27 degrees in here even with all of the windows open and as I type – at 01:40 with all of the windows open and a pleasant breeze blowing in, it’s still 24.7 degrees. Summer has well and truly acumen in. Lude sing cucu, hey what?