… anything like as much as I wanted to do today, which was something of a disappointment.

We started off on the wrong foot when I telephoned Nikon to see how they were progressing with the repairs to the Nikon D5000. Seems that they didn’t receive the authority to do the work, so they say, despite my having posting it off a month ago.

So I now have to do all of that again.

GRRRRRRRRR!

So after a couple of hours on the computer I went outside to start to cut the wood to make the window frames but although I managed to cut all of the pieces, that was about that for the phone rang.

Marianne was in need of a lift to St Hilaire to plan her walk for 10 days time.

 St Hilaire is another village a little like Chateau-sur-Cher in that the church is situated on a mound on a promontory with an excellent view of the surrounding area.

And while the history of Chateau-sur-Cher is quite well-known, almost nothing is known of the history of St Hilaire.

Nevertheless, the mound and the strategic position are very suggestive of a Dark-Age fortress of some kind.

It’s a well-known phenomenon in many similar villages that the church on the mound started off as a tiny chapel somewhere within the fortress and the church expanded as the fortress declined.

Marianne didn’t have much information on the village but we went for a good prowl around.

In the end, we had come up with tons of interesting stuff that we had discovered, as well as having a few interesting chats with the locals.

One of the aforementioned was not in the least pleased to see a couple of people wandering around looking at his house, and he freely gave vent to his displeasure.

However, not all of the locals were so ungracious.

At another house we were invited in for a drink and we had a guided tour of the old lady’s biscuit tin with all the photos, press cuttings and the like, including a newspaper from 1921 with the obituary of her grandfather.

He had a considerable claim to fame, being one of just seven survivors of the legendary Charge de Reichshoffen in 1870.

And so going from knowing very little to knowing quite a lot was the work of just an hour and a half.

Our day wasn’t over yet.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have been talking … "quite considerably" – ed … about the ephemeral Montlucon-Pionsat-Gouttières railway line.

A few weeks ago on one of my ramblings I’d stumbled across the St Fargeol railway station and as Marianne didn’t know where it was, we went the long way round on the way home in order to visit it.

I’m not sure why they called it “St Fargeol” because the station is so far away from the village – a good couple of kilometres if you ask me.

That kind of thing wasn’t important in the 1850s and 1860s because there was no other choice – if you wanted to travel, rail was the only sensible option and so you had no option other than to walk – or catch a hay-ride – to the nearest railway station wherever it might be.

But by the time that this line was opened in the 1930s, road transport was well in the ascendency and the death-knell was already sounding for many rural railway lines.

Not even railway lines and railway stations in built-up urban areas could withstand the pressure from other forms of road-based passenger transport.

These little rural railway lines stood no chance whatever and were soon all swept away. The tacots – the little narrow-gauge railway lines that infested the French rural countryside – disappeared in the blinklng of an eye and the rural branch-lines quickly followed.

All you can see now – if you look long and hard – are the indentations in the soil where the railway used to pass.

So abandoning another good rant … "for the moment " – ed … tomorrow is Saturday and I’ll be off to Commentry shopping, I hope.

But I’m going to have to do better than this for working if I’m going to treat myself to the little autumn break that I promised myself a little later on this year.

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