… view of Rennes-le-Chateau. It features in almost every book and article written about the place, and many people, including Yours Truly, have always thought that it was an aerial photograph.
But not any longer, because I can now tell you exactly how it was done and being airborne plays absolutely no part whatever in the procedure
Probably about 7 or 8 miles from here as the crow flies (those buildings at the bottom centre of the shot, just below Cardou, are the Thermal Spa buildings here at Rennes les Bains) but a heck of a lot further away by road, that’s for sure, is a very high rocky crag.
On this crag are situated the ruins of the Chateau de Le Bezu, and it is from right up here on the top, overlooking the sheer drop of several hundred metres, that the photograph of Rennes-le-Chateau has been taken.
But before you begin to set off here in droves, let me give you a couple of words of warning. There is not one single signpost to the Chateau from anywhere. There is no approved rounte and no marked pathway.
Even the Lady Who Lives In The Satnav tells me that there’s no road that goes anywhere near it. I found my way by tapping in the co-ordinates of Longitude and Latitude and following a series of cart tracks by trial end error until I could go no further.
Here, I was able just about to make out some stone blocks interwoven between the limestone outcrops (good job I had some binoculars) and so I reckoned that I could well be onto something here.
While I was reflecting over how I was going to reach the top I was joined by another van-driver. I fell in with him and we immediately started talking solar panels as his van was fitted out exactly as Caliburn, even down to the solar panel on the roof and the control boxes.
He’s a local yokel (and a very vocal local yokel too) and he’s been up here beffore and so knows the way. And very kindly, he offered to accompany me to the top so that I wouldn’t lose myself in the shrubbery.
Fortune really does smile on the brave!
Now, I’m not going to tell you anything much about the Chateau as this is yet another place that has been the subect of so much nonsense. I’ve even seen two completely different and contradictory “official histories” of the chateau.
You can do your own research from that point of view, and good luck to you too.
Let me just tell you this, though.
There is a best-selling “conspiracy theory” book that speaks about the Castle in great detail, and the authors express total bewilderment as to why a castle should be built here on this site when there were several others doing the same job in the immediate vicinity.
Anyway, I have an answer to that too
While you look at the peak of Mount Bugarach, where the world was supposed to end in 2012 if you remember correctly, you’ll notice to the extreme left another peak in the far distance.
Just beyond that peak is the Mediterranean and the port of Narbonne, and Narbonne has until very modern times been the leading port of Southern France and Northern Spain (remember until the late 15th Century the Muslems were in possession of much of the Spanish coast).
I counted three mountain passes coming this way from Narbonne, one heading off to the interior and two heading south towards the Pyrenees and Spain. Just think of all the trade goods that would be coming by these passes into this area for onward passage avoiding the Moorish galleys, and what would be the value of these goods?
Any nobleman bent on increasing his wealth (and many of these noblemen were as bent as they come) would stick a castle right on this promontory so that he could intercept the pack trains coming through the passes and demand his toll.
And the reason why the castle wasn’t immediately destroyed once it had been captured during the many times that it changed hands was because the new owner wanted it intact for exactly that purpose.
I went to Axat later to find the grave of the enigmatic Abbé Henri Boudet, one of Saunière’s closest confidants.
Here it is, and this is another so-called riddle for which there is a simple explanation.
So with him being priest at Rennes les Bains and with his mother and sister being buried there, how come he wasn’t?
The answer to that is that his mother and sister predeceased him and so he was alone. And we saw yesterday that e relinquished his living in 1914 and here on the grave, it has him dying in (March) 1915. It seems, from what I have been able to find out, that he was dying of cancer and it was probably that which caused him to abandon his post. Of course, he had no-one to care for him there but at Axat, his brother’s widowed wife was still alive and quite young too, so it is very likely that he moved to Axat so that she might care for him.
And so he died at Axat (it says that on the flat headstone) and having seen the road between Axat and Rennes-les-Bains today (and it’s more than double the 15kms that a modern best-selling author tells us) and what it is like to travel along it in certain places, I shudder to think of what it might have been like 100 years ago. No wonder they left him here at Axat.
Just a couple more things to do.
We are told that there is a statue of Jesus on a mountain top near Antugnac gazing over to his burial place at Cardou. No co-ordinates were given for this statue so it took some locating but eventually I discovered it.
Today though, he’s looking over at a brand-new villa because they have built a housing estate around him. And he couldn’t have seen Cardou anyway as there is an outlying ridge in the way that just about obscures the perspective.
A lot has been made about the two figure eights in the date on the cross – how they are formed of two small, letter ‘o’s. Clearly the propagators of this particular theory have never seen the Visigoth column in the Church of Mary Magdelene at Rennes le Chateau that we saw the other day. On there, the figure eight in the “Mission 1891” is exactly the same and they made no theory about that. It is in fact standard mason practice and you see it everywhere. It’s just that some masons are better than others.
As an aside – who says that the statue is of Jesus anyway? There’s no identification at all on the statue.
Sauniere was for a while the priest of Antugnac and so I went for a quick look at the church there.
Not much to see as it has escaped the enlargement processes so common elsewhere, but you can see at least three different styles of stonework in its construction, two of them being quite low down. The earliest stonework looks quite primitive but I wouldn’t like to hazard a date or period.
Still five minutes before dark, so a quick nip up to Montazels which was where Sauniere was born.
But here’s another conspiracy theory that everuone else has missed. High on the hills overlooking the town is an old weather-worn cross. And that is lined up absolutely and plumb-perpendicularly (I’m glad that I brought my home-made groma with me – that course in Roman surveying was magnificent) with Rennes-le-Chateau.
So what’s the reason for this please. Answers on a postcard to …
And I also found the world’s most astonishing vegetarian pizza while I was passing through Couiza. What can I say?
And we had another sales enquiry today. It’s all happening, isn’t it? Signwriting Caliburn pays dividends in spades.
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