A Cluster of Grapes

By Ron Duffy

A Cluster of Grapes is not a standard travel book; it is an adventure story. The adventure took place more than fifty years ago. Duffy had come home after two years of travelling in northern and eastern Europe. He wanted to go to university but had several months before he needed to apply. And so, unable to rest from roaming, he took off again, heading south this time. He travelled alone through southern France and north-eastern Spain, Andorra, Corsica, Sardinia, and Italy from Naples to Pisa. No ordinary traveller, Duffy rode a bicycle, slept in a tent, lived rough and loved it. Each day he filled a diary with details of his exploits, describing landscapes and cityscapes, architecture and art, wind, rain and storms with the flourish and flair of an artist, the perception and wordplay of a novelist. He tells it as he sees it, not always with kindness but with accurate, honest, and perceptive observation. He often slips into the side roads of humour and whimsy, allowing his imagination wings, inviting the reader to join him in his frequent flights of fancy. As did travel writers of the past, Duffy seeks to entertain, excite, educate and inspire his readers of today. A Cluster of Grapes will do all of those.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ron Duffy
• Release date: Jan 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215526828

Ron Duffy

Born and raised in Northern Ireland, Ron Duffy spent three years “on the road”, mostly by bicycle, travelling extensively in both western and eastern Europe, with “working sojourns” in Norway, Austria and England.  HisMy adventuring over, he settled down to studies, and obtained a BA in Geography from the Queen’s University of Belfast. He then emigrated to Canada, took an MSc in Biogeography at the University of Calgary and studied for his PhD at McGill University in Montreal. In Montreal he started a long career as a university lecturer in geography. Duffy’s writing career began when he started publishing mostly travel and history articles in numerous Irish, British and Canadian newspapers and magazines. In 1988 McGill-Queen’s University Press published his non-fiction book, The Road to Nunavut: The Progress of the Eastern Arctic Inuit since the Second World War which was based on his PhD thesis. In 1988 his play, Hearts and Minds, won first prize in the novice section of the annual Alberta Playwriting Competition. Another play, Loved and Left, was given a staged reading by Theatre 80 in Calgary. Retired from lecturing, Duffy turned to writing full-time. In the Whistler Independent Book Awards competition in 2012 his novel Crossed Lives was a nominee, and his historical novel O’Hanlon received an Honourable Mention. He has also written a trilogy of Irish novels, The Unquiet Land, In Turbulent Times, and A Further Shore, since published independently in one volume, and a World War Two novel Brandt.  As a companion volume to the Ulster trilogy he wrote Until The Troubles Started: A Brief Political History of Northern Ireland.

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A bicycle with a basket Description automatically generated with medium confidence

RON DUFFY

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

NON-FICTION

The Road to Nunavut:

The Progress of the Eastern Arctic Inuit Since World War II

Until the Troubles Started:

A Brief Political History of Northern Ireland

FICTION

The Janus Web

Crossed Lives

The Ulster Trilogy:

The Unquiet Land

In Turbulent Times

A Further Shore

O’Hanlon

Partisans and Patriots

© Ron Duffy 2023

All rights reserved

ISBN

A Note from the Author

to Gordon ‘Buzz’ Grinder

Buzz,

You are the only person who has ever read the original diary of my travels in Southern Europe. You have spoken highly of it many times over the years; it obviously made a big impression on you. When I used the diary to write a ‘standard’ travel book, Two Wheels South, you didn’t like it. Too much of the spirit of the original diary and too much of the character of the author were lost in the book. So here, Buzz, is the original diary, just as I wrote it, just as you read it so long ago. This is for you, with my gratitude for over half a century of valued friendship shared with you and Barbara.

Enjoy.

Ron

All my life one of my greatest desires has been to travel—to see and touch unknown countries, to swim in unknown seas, to circle the globe, observe new lands, seas, people, and ideas with insatiable appetite, to see everything for the first time and for the last time, casting a slow, prolonged glance, then to close my eyes and feel the riches deposit themselves inside me calmly or stormily according to their pleasure, until time passes them at last through its fine sieve, straining the quintessence out of all the joys and sorrows.

Nikos Kazantzakis: Report to Greco

Change is his mistress; Chance his counsellor,

Love cannot hold him; Duty forge no chain.

The wide seas and the mountains call him.

And grey dawns know his campfires in the rain.

Anonymous

INTRODUCTION:

THE POET AND THE VINEYARD

––––––––

Sir Philip Sidney, a poet himself, wrote that the poet ‘doth not only show you the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way, as will entice any man to enter into it; nay, he doth, as if your journey should lie throughout a fair vineyard, at the very first give you a cluster of grapes, that full of that taste you may long to pass further.’

My journey did lie through a fair vineyard, the vineyard of Europe, and though I cannot lay claim to being a poet, I offer the following pages as a cluster of grapes, which I hope may give you a taste for travelling further into those countries through which I travelled: southern France and north-eastern Spain, Andorra, Corsica, Sardinia, and Italy from Naples to Pisa. The grapes I gathered on my travels in those summer lands of sun and wine were stored within the pages of my diary and here presented to the reader largely as they were when first I plucked them from the vines of travel and experience over fifty years ago. They should have matured in half a century, fermented perhaps into something intoxicating. Some may yet be sweet and juicy; some dry, some sour, some wizened or gone bad. I give you the bunch and ask only that you remember those that you enjoyed while forgetting those that may not have agreed with you.

Gathering grapes, metaphorically and literally, was a most important part of my travels. In the metaphorical sense of filling my diary with the fruits of each day’s journey, I tried to put in as much as possible, keeping, as Dr Johnson advised, ‘a constant and copious journal.’ In transferring these daily observations from the diary to the printed book I have tried to be as gentle with them as possible, making only what alterations, additions, and omissions as were necessary for the sake of interest, readability, and clarity, and so to preserve as much as I could of the freshness and excitement of first impressions.

One advantage of adhering to the diary in the writing of this book is that the reader may be able to see the gradual enlarging of a mind stimulated by travel, by daily contact with the new and wonderful, and, of more importance perhaps, by stepping out of what PW Martin, in his book An Experiment in Depth, calls ‘the artificiality of urban existence,’ to ‘come a degree nearer the natural man, the state of being where wind and weather, heat and cold, hunger and thirst, earth and sky are closer to us.’

Gathering grapes in the literal sense was another activity in which I frequently indulged on this journey. They provided me with free food. Clusters of sweet grapes from the vineyards; apples, peaches, and pears from the roadside orchards; they fed me often on my travels. From this you will understand that my tour of southern Europe was not one of the luxurious, no-expenses-spared variety. Expenses had, on the contrary, to be kept at the lowest possible level because I possessed the lowest possible means. I had just returned to my home in Northern Ireland after having already spent two years in cycling around in northern and eastern Europe. I wanted to go to university, but I still had a few months before I needed to apply and I found, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, that I could not rest from roaming. The untravelled world still gleamed through the arch of past experience. There was still the south of Europe and the shores of the Mediterranean which Dr Johnson considered to be ‘the grand object of travelling ... On those shores were the four great empires of the world, the Assyrian, the Persian, the Grecian and the Roman. All our religion, almost all our law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above savages, has come to us from the shores of the Mediterranean.’ So I loaded up my bicycle again and off I went.

That brings me to the only introduction I have to make: my bike. For a lone cyclist his bike is more than just a means of trans-port: it becomes a companion, in much the same way as, we are told, a horse does to a cowboy. Many bicycles acquire person-alities and are given names by their owners. The author Bernard Newman, great nephew of George Eliot, used to call his bicycle George. Mine now answers to the name of Old Hobo. It may not be a flattering name, but I doubt if he objects to it. Mind you, he has a right to object; for Old Hobo is an aristocrat of the road, a thoroughbred mount from the stable of Jack Taylor in Stockton-on-Tees. In many ways the name Old Hobo suits him. He has shared my wanderings all over the British Isles and the mainland of Europe. He is a bit battered and travel-worn now, more of a tramp royal than a blue-enamelled aristocrat, and many of his breeding pass him by with their noses in the air and do not recognise him as one of their own. But Old Hobo does not care. He is too easy-going to be spiteful and besides, I think he loves the tramp’s life as much as I do.

I need to make one more point. When I set off on this trip the only definite plans I had were to meet friends from Belfast in Barcelona and follow them down to Tarragona. I also hoped to meet other friends, also from Belfast, who were on holiday at Lloret on the Costa Brava. After that I could go where I wanted. The ability to range and to change at will is the prerogative of the unhampered solo traveller. It was a prerogative I was prepared to exercise to the fullest. As circumstances altered, my plans altered, but always I went my own way.

Allons, mes amis, come travel with me!

Here is my cluster of grapes.

A CLUSTER OF GRAPES

Friday, 7th August

Paris on a summer evening. The sun a big red ball balanced on the skyline. I strolled towards it up the Rue Saint-Antoine and the Rue de Rivoli heading to the Louvre. Past the Hôtel de Ville, Paris opened up against me the full armoury of her charms. I surrendered, as I always have, gave myself up wholeheartedly to this séductrice. Beyond the Louvre, the gardens, trees, fountains and sculpture of the Tuileries lay in wait for me, the beautiful terraces lying back on either side. The apparent vastness of the Place de la Concorde—perhaps too vast—and the unforgettable lights, laughter and liveliness of the Champs-Elysées stretching before me into the velvet darkness of an evening in Paris.

I strolled no further than the Place de l’Etoile and the floodlit Arc de Triomphe, then retraced my steps down the Champs-Elysées, past the posh shops, the plush hotels, the noisy open-air cafes. People milled about, lightly dressed in the summer heat, and their animated conversation and laughter drowned even the roar of traffic.

I took the Métro to the Gare de Lyon, and in the train that rushed me through the darkness to Clermont I saw in my fitful dreams the night and the lights and the white splash of fountains, the ripple of pools, the shadowing trees,

the terraced streets,

The glittering boulevards, the white colonnades

Of fair fantastic Paris ...

Surely there cannot be a more enchanting city than Paris. Paris is unique, yet universal. She is old, yet always young. She is vivacious and vital, and in French she is masculine. It is Le not La Paris. How could the French, of all people, have given male gender to a city so luxuriously, so deliciously feminine.

I was disappointed to find Clermont-Ferrand wet from rain, and the sky above sombre with grey clouds. The mountains roundabout were damp and dejected, like holiday-makers on a rainy day, but at least I could see them. They are steeply folded mountains, scrubby in appearance, and dominated by the Puy de Dôme which looked, on approaching Clermont, like a squashed version of the Rio Sugarloaf. A second disappointment was that Old Hobo isn’t here yet and would not arrive perhaps until this evening or maybe tomorrow morning.

What should I do now, Monsieur Porteur?

Well, you could start by stowing your bags in the left-luggage office, then off you can go to explore Clermont-Ferrand.

And that’s what I did. I took my dawdling time, and felt in the end that I made a good job of it. My feet bore me out on that.

The town occupies a crossroads in the heart of France. Old and picturesque, it shows off newer quarters where modern architecture has butted in like a gate-crasher at a party. The old parts of town are of narrow streets tightly enclosed in tall, shuttered rows of grubby houses and shops, little dark restaurants and bars. Smells everywhere: smells of food cooking (today it was fish), smells of coffee, smells of urinals. The Place de Jaude, the town centre, consists of large, flagged courts with seats shaded by trees of a kind I have never seen before. They have large, heart-shaped, pointed leaves and long, thin pods, and according to the tourist office literature they are catalpas, an American species and the only kind to thrive in Clermont-Ferrand’s chemical water.

A statue of General Desaix stands at one end of the square. This noble commander of Napoleon’s forces fought and defeated the armies of Europe until he fell at Marengo. In the centre of the square another famous soldier is commemorated by an impressive mounted figure set on a decorative plinth, his sword raised in defiance over a dead enemy. Vercingetorix, the unfortunate local chieftain, fought and defeated the armies of Rome until he fell to Caesar who had him dragged away in chains, tortured for six years, then strangled. He was a vindictive man was Julius; not the forgiving kind. Not kind at all. I saw a study for the Vercingetorix memorial in the Musée Bargan, one of the least interesting museums I have ever visited. The works of art on display—huge, awful canvases—appear to have been bought cheaply at an auction.

Another square is the Place Delille where a tree-embowered fountain splashes clear water, and me as thirsty as a duck in a drought. And hungry too. I had eaten only one roll, last night on the Rue Saint-Antoine, since breakfast yesterday. So I bought a hunk of bread, sat on a bench below the trees of the Place Delille, and munched the loaf with chocolate spread I bought yesterday in London. Physically fortified, I walked to the parish church, built in rough, grey stone in an old quarter of the city known as the ‘ville noire’ because of the dark, volcanic stone with which it is built. Not much light filters through the coloured windows of the parish church. Dark as a tomb and just as musty, it emanates antiquity. If buildings had wrinkles there would not be a smooth stone from its slabbed floor to the plain curve of its barrel-vaulted ceiling, and its columns, with exquisitely carved capitals, would be weak and shaky at the knees. But Notre Dame du Port is sturdy and solid yet, as unshakeable as the faith that built it.

The cathedral is dark and musty too. The windows, especially the splendid rose windows, are beautiful to look at but fail in their duty of letting God’s light into the building. Not that there was much light today to let in. The style of the cathedral is gothic, and its two high spires can be seen for miles around.

What else do I have to mention? Pascal, petrifying springs, and les pneus Michelin.

First, Pascal. The pathetic Blaise Pascal, in poor health since age eighteen and dead at thirty-nine, was born and spent the first few years of his tortured life here in Clermont. A couple of return visits he made to his birthplace are commemorated on a plaque on an old stone gateway in the Jardins Lecoq.

A lake shimmers in a peaceful hollow in these gardens. A small menagerie attracts the budding zoologist, while the energetic—or not so energetic—can enjoy scented walks among flowerbeds and trees. Better to take advantage of these attractions in whatever way you choose because guardians of the gardens with more eyes than the Lernaean Hydra do not approve of visitors or vagabonds sleeping on their park benches, not even for an after-dinner nap. I know this from personal experience when I was rudely roused from a kip after lunch.

Second, petrifying springs. Clermont owes this attraction to its volcanic past. I was drawn to them by signposts proclaiming their ‘petrifying properties’, then repelled by other signposts shouting the prices of admission. They alone were enough to petrify me. I don’t think I missed much. ‘Petrifying springs’ exist all over the world, but the most renowned are said to be here in Auvergne, a volcanic region where a number of springs deposit large amounts of travertine, the stuff that goes to stalagmites and stalactites. Articles laid out on shelves are exposed to water that rises from faulted granite. After several months they become encrusted with pure white crystalline travertine. No; I didn’t miss much.

Finally the fabulous fairy story of M Michelin, the round, roly-poly, Humpty Dumpty figure, now so familiar to everyone, even far beyond his native land of France. A fabulous story indeed, but true.

Once upon a time, more than a hundred years ago, there lived a Scottish maiden whose father was very, very clever. He it was who first united cloth and india rubber to make waterproof material for coats to wear in the rain. His name was Mr MacIntosh, so the grateful populace called his raincoats after him, but spelt them ‘mackintoshes’ to distinguish them from the clever man who manufactured them.

Now one evening Miss MacIntosh, his beautiful daughter, attended a Great Ball in her most glittering, sequined, off-the-shoulder waterproof, the loveliest her father ever made. There she won the heart of handsome Prince Michelin, whose somewhat rotund figure bounced and bounded everywhere in that Great Ballroom. The young couple fell madly in love, for she adored cuddly men, and he had a passion for off-the-shoulder waterproofs. Then, carrying madness to extremes, the two were married, and away he rode with her to his cloud-capped castle in far-away Clermont.

There in this little village on a high hill, in a land ringed around by sleeping volcanoes, the Michelins owned a wonderful toyshop, une boutique fantasque. Yet the little roly-poly Michelin children, surrounded by all the beautiful toys their father sold, preferred the simple playthings their mother made, for she was very, very clever like her father. She remembered how Mr MacIntosh used to roll india rubber into balls that bounced. She did the same for her children, and Prince Michelin, beaming smiles of delight, placed them in his toyshop.

Caoutchouc was the magic word that made the Michelins rich and famous. ‘Caoutchouc,’ they said, and the Genie known as Progress came bringing bicycles. ‘Make me tyres for these,’ the Genie said, ‘and you will grow very, very rich.’ So they made tyres for the bicycles and grew very, very rich. Caoutchouc,’ they said again, and again the Genie known as Progress appeared, this time bringing motor cars. ‘Make me tyres for these,’ the Genie said, ‘and you will grow ever richer and richer.’ So they made tyres for the motor cars and grew ever richer and richer.

And the village grew ever richer and richer, and people flocked there, at first in hundreds, then in thousands. They learned the magic word Caoutchouc, and it brought them work and great wealth.

Then the Genie known as Progress brought them two Great Wars, and after the last Great War more and more and still more motor cars, till there were more motor cars even than bicycles and nearly as many motor cars as people. And lorries and tractors and buses, and even bicycles with engines. The Genie known as Progress was indeed good to the Michelins, and in all the land of France only they knew the magic word Caoutchouc. And more and more people came to Clermont to learn the magic word till the little village on the hill was no longer able to contain them all.

One day it burst wide open at the seams, and people spilled out down the hill and into the valley and all around the little village of Montferrand that stood nearby. Then Clermont and Ferrand became as one big town, and they called it Clermont-Ferrand. And the people of Montferrand also learned the magic word of the Michelins, so that they too could become very, very rich. And here in their fantastic land, ringed around by sleeping volcanoes, whispering the magic word Caoutchouc, they all lived happily ever after.

There are probably other things about Clermont which I meant to mention, but they have slipped my mind and perhaps a lot I did not even see. But I could not miss the weather. The clouds of morning sank low over the puys, obscuring views of the Puy de Dôme which, I am told, dominates Clermont as Mont Blanc dominates Chamonix. From high points in the town I could look down into the valleys and see the red-roofed houses climbing the hillsides, and the hillsides climbing into the clouds. Occasionally it rained, but for a while in the afternoon the cloud broke and the sun shone. The day was warm then, and I thought, or hoped, that the sky would clear. It didn’t. Instead, the clouds gathered again, darker and lower than before, and the showers were torrential. This change in the weather, together with the fact that Old Hobo was not released from the care of the customs till after five o’clock—at first I thought they were going to keep him in quarantine for a month—forced on me the decision to go to the youth hostel. Half past five in pouring rain is no time to go looking for a campsite in unknown country.

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Saturday, 8th August

I left the youth hostel early and set off through the now-familiar streets of Clermont-Ferrand heading to the high road to the Puy de Dôme. It climbs up and up and ever up, curving into the hills and gaining as reward a balcony view of the town. I could see the flat hollow in which Clermont lies and the rough scrubby hills that surround it, a situation that Chateaubriand considered one of the loveliest in the world. I hardly think he could have been serious though. Out of the town the big, black cathedral towered above all else, raising two irreverent fingers to heaven and to the world at large.

Like Clermont cathedral, the Puy de Dôme towers mightily above all else around it. It loomed into view soon after I had slogged up from Clermont and it remained in view to the right of the road until I crossed the Col de la Moreno. Admittedly it was not always in view, or at least not in full view, because it wore a fringe of cloud—il porta son bonnet, as the French say—which the wind wafted aside only once or twice to show me the mountaintop. Because of this cloud-cap I deemed it not worth my while to ride the road to the summit, for I would have seen nothing at all of the famous view which, according to the tourist literature, covers a radius of two hundred miles, a dozen départements, and an eighth of France. The cloud was an excuse. I don’t know whether to stick to it or to come out frankly and admit that I never had any intention of cycling to the summit in any case. In binding a road around him from heels to head—it used to be a spiral railway—engineers have, so to speak, shorn the locks of this 5,000-foot giant, the oldest, most famous, and by 1,500 feet the highest of the chain of volcanoes known as the Chaȋne des Puys. They have taken away his strength and his stature and reduced him from a noble peak to an ignoble playground for tourists. Meanwhile, all his lesser brethren jeer at him from their forests for they have remained inviolate. I am sure there is a moral there.

About sixty of these lesser brethren make up the Chaîne des Puys, all ancient volcanoes grown impotent, with not a spark of life left in them. Between two of them the road curves gently across the Col de la Moreno, about 3,500 feet high. It was bitterly cold up there today, and on the way down into the foothills on the other side an icy wind drove sharp, thin rain into my face. I envied the village of Orcival, lying snug in the bottom of the valley, wrapped in a thick, woody blanket. A quaint little place on a picturesque bend in the road, Orcival is proud of its great Romanesque church.

Here began the climb towards Mont Dore, and I was taking it easily in my low gears when the drizzle fizzled out and the cloud lifted off the mountains that grouped like a choir round the head of the valley. It was clear up there now, where green fields and hedgerows and clumps of beechwood gave way to the bare, brown heath of the col. The road crossed the col to the upper reaches of another valley out of whose forest rose two huge crags of sharp rock, covered with bushy scrub. Caves in the rock looked like cavities in bad teeth, and that indeed is what the crags resembled: a pair of old, stumpy teeth of gigantic proportions. They are probably the weathered core of a once young and lively volcano, now grown old and decrepit; at least one of them appeared to have sides of columnar basalt. I had named them Gargantua and Pantagruel, but French geographers of the non-literary class know them as Tuilière and Sandoire. But then, what’s in a name? 

I stopped for a lunch of wild raspberries and bread while sitting out a couple of drizzly showers, then started riding again, but with little enthusiasm. Here was beautiful country, and I hated to see it half-shrouded in cloud. A geographer, such as I hope be, could study it and write a thesis about it; map its valleys and volcanoes; describe its lovely woods and lonely uplands; note that it grows wheat and barley, and pastures cattle, the red and white vaches ferrandaises, as well as sheep and goats. This is still a peasant region with a pastoral landscape, its soil’s fertility an inheritance from the volcanic origin of its hunched mountains and crater lakes, one of which was once believed to lead into the depths of hell: an Avernus in Auvergne.

Musing thus on the country around me, I followed the high road onto the Col de Guery, with Lac de Guery below it on my right. Beyond were more valleys, deep, forested ravines, above which the Mont Dore mountains hid behind drapes of cloud. Into those ravines the road dropped in long loops while the mountains increased in height overhead. Then the town of Mont Dore appeared below me, small and grey in the hug of wild glen, with steep hillsides and cliffs on either side and the glen continuing to rise behind it to the shrouded summits of the mountains. Mont Dore is, and has the unmistakeable appearance of, a spa, a health resort high in the misty mountains where ends the railway line along which the Thermal Express carries duchesses and dowagers, counts and criminals to take the waters and a lot of liberties in its tall, imposing stone hotels and villas, in its Etablissement Thermal, and its casino. It is nevertheless a most agreeable town, one that would make an excellent centre for a walking holiday or winter sports.

The enticing, exciting Dordogne river is born high in the Mont Dore mountains, below the Puy de Sancy, and takes its first tottering steps down the precipitous slopes into the town of Mont Dore. There I saw the stripling river from the bridge that lifts the road to Latour d’Auvergne over the stream’s stony obstacle course. From the streamside I climbed through beechwoods that hide the hillsides high above the valley, took a deep breath, then plunged again, through pinewoods this time, into the peacefulness of a little-frequented forest road. The rain began, and when I left the cover of the trees the day was miserable. I stopped once in the shelter of pine trees to read for a while, hoping that the rain would pass. My hoping was in vain. But where I stopped to read, I found an excellent little campsite. With trees as a windbreak behind the tent and a panorama of mountain and valley in front, I pitched my tent and have been writing in it ever since. It is now seven-thirty. Time to start supper.

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Sunday, 9th August

I gained nothing by my early stop yesterday. When I woke at a quarter to six this morning, low, wet cloud still shrouded the sky; the air was damp and steamy as the inside of a sauna, but not nearly as warm. Had the air been clear I might have enjoyed a spectacular view from my campsite. I had pitched the tent on the edge of a steep valley which opened into a landscape of fields and farms and hedgerows, though what lay beyond them I do not know. At the head of this valley, and not far from the tent, rose another of those isolated peaks, like Tuilière or Sandoire, but its lower slopes were smooth and surmounted by a large square rock which looked, especially in the mist, like a fortress. This was La Roche Vendeix

The road on which I set out overlooked a forested ravine that surrounded this castle-rock like a moat. Then the road dropped swiftly through woods of old, tall pines. Drizzle was still falling, fine as dust, and the road thought it would do me a good turn by lifting me up above the cloud, above the drizzle that floated out of it.. So up it climbed. Up and up. The cloud, becoming wise to that strategy, grew thicker and wetter, forcing the road to forego the unequal struggle and come down again. So did the drizzle. Like a hive of disturbed bees, it pursued the road relentlessly and I suffered with a soaking for the folly of that on which I was only a traveller. French roads don’t give up. Instead of trying to out-climb the cloud, for which it was hopelessly handicapped, it changed tactics and dropped lower and lower. It left the forests behind and made a long descent through an open countryside of yellow grass. The grass was all I could see. The rest was scrimmed by mist, except for the blurred shapes of trees, cattle, and a couple of horses, all of which were close to the road. This time the cloud gave up the struggle. The persistent road dropped out of its reach, dropped into a lush valley, and hurried away to Latour d’Auvergne.

Latour stands precariously on a high crag from which it commands a view over its wide-flung surroundings like a feudal lord, or like that lordly family, famous in French history, from which sprang Henri de Latour d’Auvergne, the ‘Great Turenne’, who led the armies of Louis XIII and Louis XIV to victory. The main street of the noble general’s hometown, which may not have changed all that much since his day, curves between grey stone houses, while narrow lanes lead off steeply, up to my left, down to my right, with steps cut here and there, or an archway thrown across them.

My road from Latour to Bort les Orgues raced downhill and ran away across a rough terrain of rock and heather, hills and woods and marshland. It was a merry little road—merry as anything could be in such foul weather—darting here and there, up hill and down dale, winding in and out among the hillocks and the outcrops of heather-clad rock, and finishing with a long descent into Bort.

One of those narrow valley towns with a long main street lined with dull shops and houses, Bort had little appeal for me. Further-more, the town is an industrial centre for the hydroelectricc barrages of the Dordogne gorges. They provide France with a hefty share of its HEP, and the seventy-five mile stretch of the river that produces it has been described facetiously as ‘one dam thing after another.’ The river rushes through the town, as if eager to escape, and on each side of it high hills rise steeply, covered in trees. Along the top of the hills on the other side of the river, a line of cliffs, two hundred and fifty feet high, have been fluted vertically so that they resemble, with a stretch of the imagination, organ pipes. Hence the name Bort les Orgues.

The road from Bort defies accurate description. The complex of valleys through which it led me was as addling as the Hampton Court Maze. Valleys ran berserk in all directions: deep valleys, shallow valleys, long valleys, short valleys, all scenically wooded, some more densely than others. As there were numerous valleys, so there were numerous hills and ridges separating them. Some were covered completely by forest; others bared their ribs of cliff or summit crags and rocks. The poor road, equally as confused as I, did not know where to go. Sometimes it was high on a wooded ridge or low on the floor of a valley, feeling hopelessly lost. Then it would lose its head completely and go charging up a steep mountainside, swinging wildly from side to side, only to find at the top that it had to go careering madly down again.

Ydes drove it frantic. The road flapped into Ydes to find itself confronted by half a dozen different glens, all of which converge in the densely treed hollow where the village lies. Here the railway appears out of a hole in the mountain, scurries across a high viaduct over one of the ravines, and disappears again into another hole like a frightened ferret. The road takes its general direction from the railway but does not find it quite so easy. There are no holes through mountains for the road, nor imposing bridges across ravines. It has to twist and turn to find the easiest way up and the safest way down, even if that means doubling back and looking down on its own tail. I perforce had to go along with the road, but I found it a very agreeable companion. It showed me ever-changing views of mountains, valleys, forests, and waited for me patiently if my speed was not up to that to which it was accustomed. Once I stopped to fill a bag with blackberries, competing for the best with the bees, and this reminded me, if my stomach had forgotten, that it had been a long time since breakfast.

Ten past nine on a warm summer evening. The sun gone down, the clouds barred across the darkening sky. Smoke curling up from a dozing campfire. Supper eaten. Dishes washed. Silence, but for the bustle of the river, the hooting of an owl in the woods, the chirruping of a cicada in the grass behind the tent. All is peace and sweet contentment.

I look back at lunchtime when I started writing today’s entry in the diary, crouched in a shelter made by spreading my poncho-cape across a bent sapling and pegging it down, while ‘outside’, the thick drizzle fell continuously. But it eased off before I left my lunch spot, and silver-edged billows of grey cumulus cauliflowered into blue sky. The warmth of the sun raised steam from the wet road.

Below me on my left stretched a long valley from which other smaller valleys ran out between wooded hills into a blue landscape far beyond. I was glad to see that there was a beyond, an ever-beckoning beyond, and not just a dismal grey void. The railway appeared out of its subterranean passages again—I got the impression that it was just sheltering in there from the rain—and it joined the road for the last stretch across the plains to Mauriac.

A policeman posted there was diverting traffic onto the Tulle road. I was curious to know the reason for the diversion, and besides, I wanted to see the church in Mauriac which is advertised as being ‘le principal monument de l’art roman de la Haute-Auvergne.’ So I dismounted at the diversion and walked Old Hobo down the hill into the centre of town. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the reason for the diversion was the Grand Prix Cycliste de Mauriac. A Kermesse, round-the-houses bicycle race attended by the whole population. I stopped to watch, of course, and to listen to the loudspeakers calling out the positions of the leading riders and their teams. The citizens took a keen interest in the race and cheered loudly at the mention of local riders or of popular national favourites. I could not help comparing the advantages French cyclists have over us at home who have to sneak out like criminals in the cold half-light of a summer sunrise to ride our races and clear the roads before the weekend traffic and the day-trippers take over. No roadblocks and traffic diversions for us.

I did not see the church in Mauriac. Having watched the race for as long as I dared, I bought cheap tomatoes and bread and left the town by the diversionary road to Tulle which I followed not quite a far as Spontour. A superb journey. A couple of miles out of Mauriac the road enters a narrow glen and winds beside the river, down through the trees that smother the banks on either side and run the risk of choking the stream to death. Suddenly a new view made me stop and stare. To escape throttling by trees, the river had somewhere plunged hundreds of feet into a ravine. The banks had widened, and hefty bulwarks of bare rock hulked above the trees. I continued the descent slowly, my hands on the brakes, my eyes on the view in front, admiring its changing aspect with every bend in the road. Imagine a V-shaped valley, hundreds of feet deep, gouged in a sinuous line out of the mountains as if by the burin of a gargantuan engraver. Its sides, from riverbed to mountain crest, are completely covered, every square inch, with all kinds of deciduous trees, so that not even the river can be seen, only its course winding away between the hills. The rocks I saw higher up the valley have gone and so have the pine trees that grew upon the crags. Nothing now but forest and mountain and the muffled murmur of the river.

Six o’clock already; time I stopped for the night. Dusk creeps across the land about eight, and darkness is swift upon its heels. I came to a rough track descending steeply to my right and disappearing into woods. Could there be a clearing down there? I left Old Hobo by the roadside and went to investigate. To my delight the track led to a long, recently mown hayfield on the banks of a river, a perfect campsite, surrounded by high, wooded hills. I returned to the road to fetch Old Hobo. (Someday I shall train him to come by himself, like Trigger, in response to a whistle. But first I have to learn to whistle.)

I gathered an armful of dead wood, lit a fire, put a billy on to boil, pitched the tent. When I was about to prepare supper I made the disconcerting discovery that my pot of jam had spilled into one of the pannier bags. Everything in it had to be taken out and washed in the river. So had the bag itself. So had I. Reminding myself to be more careful in future, I returned to the campfire for a last mug of tea, a mug of sweet self-content.

I left everything ready for the morning, stashed a pile of dry firewood and kindling under the cape, and retired to my tent with candle and diary. Almost ten-thirty now. The sky is pitch dark and must have clouded over, for all the stars I saw earlier this evening have disappeared.

A bicycle with a basket Description automatically generated with medium confidence

Monday, 10th August

Two hours after a grey dawn, clouds breaking up and making a promise of a finer day ahead, I was back on the road. It swooped down that marvellous valley, crossed the river once, climbed high above it again, and then, where the glen opened into the Dordogne valley, it arrived at a single-span concrete bridge by which another road from Mauriac leapt across to join it for the run into Spontour. The Dordogne was as still as sleep and dreaming peacefully, its undisturbed surface mirroring the wooded banks in which it lay. No movement, no sign of flowing, the river looked more like a long ribbon of lake.

Spontour, a village as dreamy as the river, arranged itself prettily along its bank, like young girls posing for a photograph. From there, the Dordogne meanders between the hills. On one of its many bends I stopped to watch a woman poling a child in a punt from a lonely house on the opposite bank across the broad, shadowed stream below me, bringing him or her to the main road, perhaps for school.

Where the Luzège comes down to join the Dordogne the road runs along the bank of the tributary until it finds a suitable crossing place, then immediately doubles back onto the hillside above the Dordogne, as if it could not bear to be out of sight of the big river for long. If such is the case, it received a sad rebuff. At Luval, a hill-top village of slate-roofed, stone-built houses, bunches of grapes dangling from the garden fences, the river turned disdainfully away from the road, and the road, crossed in hopeless love, climbed like one forlorn up a narrow glen to a little village called Le Poteau du Gay, a name that must have a story behind it. Maybe it’s one I don’t want to hear. Beyond, lay upland forests with fields here and there cultivated by the occupants of the old stone houses nearby.

The Dordogne seemed to be miles away. Heaving a sad sigh, the road descended into Marcillac, a plain, undistinguished little town of grey stone, and turned immediately to the left, trying to find its way back again to the river. But its spirits did not rise. It passed drearily through miles of featureless forest and then, just before Saint-Martin, it caught its first glimpse of the Dordogne since their separation. An immediate transformation occurred. Bounding joyously through Saint-Martin and La Bitarelle, two villages whose stone houses and bosky gardens would not have been out of place in Cotswold England, the road began the descent to the river and, like a horse taking the bit between its teeth, galloped off madly down the glen. Old Hobo would have liked to do the same, but I held him in check, even stopped him once or twice to cool his brake-heated rims, to pick blackberries, and to allow time to admire the grandly spectacular view over the trees below me. Down there the glen widened into the Dordogne valley, while all around towered mountains of forest and blunt crags below which the river lay, still calm and placidly dreaming, like a child.

I rode down into Argentat, a busy little town where I was struck by how otherwise pleasant streets can become cluttered and spoiled by too many advertising signs and lights suspended outside shops. In one of the baker’s shops, I bought a baguette and rushed off with it towards Beaulieu, looking for a place to stop for lunch. I found one by following a footpath along a tributary stream, but before eating anything I became engrossed in making wire handles for my canteen set, punching holes in the sides of three billies with a chain-rivet extractor so that they can be hung on a ‘crane’ above the fire when no stones are handy for building a hearth. I tried it out right away by brewing tea and I’m pleased with the result. With tea and fresh bread I ate the blackberries I picked in the glen above Argentat. They grew there in thick clusters, black as tar, sweet as honey, big as footballs, and so ripe they fell into my hands in pound pots of bramble jelly.

In the afternoon I enjoyed a splendid fifteen-mile ride down the river to Beaulieu. The valley in this stretch is wide and cultivated, and many picturesque old farmhouses with lots of character are built of local stone. Grapes become more plentiful, growing in small hillside vineyards or hanging in bunches from vines that twine around farmhouse pergolas. Across the river, swift streams have gouged chasms and deep fissures into the hillsides, and Mother Nature has filled them chock-a-block with trees. The trees grow packed tight almost everywhere, except where crags and cliffs break through, or fields have been cleared for the tiny villages, sometimes seen perched precariously high on the steeps above the river. How beautiful this valley is now, yet what must it be like in autumn, ablaze with the full rainbow range of colours from almost every kind of deciduous tree there is. Mind-thrilling just to imagine it.

Beaulieu is exactly what its name implies: a beautiful place. I spent only a couple of hours there but wished I could have stayed longer to do some sketching. But what to sketch? The old Abbey church with a carved doorway dating from the eleventh century, a Roman belltower, and a northeast corner made sketch-worthy by curved chapels, little round turrets and octagonal tower? Or maybe inside the church where it is cool, and where the pale colour of its aged stone saves it from that sombre dimness of similar buildings? Here I could have sketched the soaring curves of the nave and the slightly pointed arches between the pillars. I liked this church. I almost wished I were a Catholic, or at least a Christian, so that I could have knelt before that fine altar with the curve of pillars behind it and prayed. Or prayed in one of the small, rounded chapels that opened off the ambulatory; any of them except the one with the horrid Baroque altar.

Had I taken my sketchbook outside