Now, this is where things get difficult.  Four castles, located at different points along the ridge, each with their own distinct identity.  But how to establish which photos were of which castle, when two of them are actually quite similar, and all I have to tell which is which is a series of site plans...

Castle #1 now, The Tower of Quertinheux, which is described tin the site guide as follows:-

'Of complex structure, the castle combines aspects of Cabaret and Tour Regine [information about these will follow...'.  It has a circular tower surrounded by a vast polygonal curtain wall.  A zigzag wall system defends the main access.'

The castles were once occupied by the Cabaret family, who made their fortune from mining iron in the Black Mountains.  They had close links with the Cathars, and the nearby village (or in Scots parlance, 'castletoun') was attacked by Simon de Montfort and his cronies during the Albigensian Crusade.





Another view of the same structure now (I hope!!) showing another view of the 'vast polygonal curtain wall:'

Okay, it sounds epic.  And it is.  Just imagine a ridge walk, with the additional attraction of four random summit-located castles on the route...

Here's a view of the village of Lastours, with its rather spectacular backdrop:-





As you can see, the weather wasn't particularly good that day.  In fact, the conditions were positively Scottish (though slightly warmer, admittedly!).  But the landscape was undoubtedly French, what with all the cypress trees, etc.:-






These four castles are located in a mountain range known as the Black Mountains, and they have their origins in the time of the Cathars.  But - as with Carcassone - the visible remains post-date the Albigensian Crusade, dating instead to the French occupation of the area:-





The situations of these castles are spectacular, and over the next couple of days, I'll give you a more detailed tour of each of them:-

But it was worth it.  It's a glorious day out there, and it would have been a shame to waste.

THEN I had to water the plants when I came home....

So I'm not going to do anything too intellectual in the blog tonight.  Before I introduce you to more Languedoc castles, I'll take you on whistlestop tour of some of the buildings that caught my eye during my perambulation around La Bastide de Saint Louis.

But first of all, thanks to the success of Labyrinth, when I think of Carcassone, I always think of Kate Mosse.  And what always made me laugh there was the fact that there were pictures of Kate Moss everywhere.  It was, of course, the other Kate Moss (without the 'e'), but it amused me nonetheless.  So of course I had to take a picture:- 




I'm sorry.  I just had to share it with you...

To architecture now...

First of all, here's the dome in the square overlooking the Boulevard Camille Pelletan.  It seems quite ancient to me (?seventeeth century, perhaps??) but I can't find any references to it in any of the literature I brought back with me:-




Pictured below is the Jacobins Gate, built after 1779 on the site of an earlier gateway which once formed part of the city walls, a fragment of which still survives:-





Here's the Hotel du Murat, an eighteenth century building, again overlooking the Boulevard Camille Pelletan:-




And lastly, two lovely early twentieth century buildings, both built in the inter-war period in the Art Nouveau style.  Both are schools:-








And now I'm going to have to crawl off and sleep.  It's been one of those days, I guess...

It's sunny!!  It's hot!!

Could summer actually be here???

Maybe that's too much to ask for, but I've just been running around like a mad thing and now I'm going out to the Writers' Group, so no post tonight, I fear!!

I shall be back tomorrow...

What a day.  Upped my mileage on the bike to 17 miles today, managed to beat J in the sprint for the 30mph sign two weeks running (he says he let me win, but I think I caught him napping.  I am, however, now paying a heavy price for that endeavour, as I'm KNACKERED!!).  And I've started pricking out my poppy Dawn Chorus, which means I've run out of space for plants again and I've embarked on a marathon job which will take forever.  Another pot has been constructed on the patio - photos will be posted next weekend!!

Some prehistory now, as I'm sure you all want a little break from medieval castles and churches...

While plotting itineraries for our Carcassone trip, I discovered that within reasonably easy reach of Carcassone was a prehistoric monument which was renowned as the biggest Neolithic chambered tomb in south-west France.

So naturally, I had to seek it out.

Named Le Dolmen de Les Fades (I think 'Tomb of the Fairies' is probably a reasonable translation...), it lay near the little town of Piepioux just north of the region of Caunes-Minervois.  When I tried to tell our interested hosts at the hotel of our forthcoming visit to the site, they just looked vague, even though I was trying to use helpful terms like un monument prehistorique, un dolmen Neolithique, etcetera.  In the end, I think they thought I was delusional, and that I'd either made it up, or hallucinated the whole thing. 

Perhaps it was my lousy pronounciation...

Anyway, I can assure you all that I did not imagine Le Dolmen de les Fades.  I even have the photographs to prove it. 

It was extremely big.  Unfortunately, I can't tell you how big, because I didn't have a measuring tape and by the time we actually found it, I was too exhausted to pace the thing out.  It had been a long day...

It is, of course, a burial mound from the Early Neolithic period.  I'm not well-versed in the Neolithic of south-west France, but I guess the principles of this Neolithic tomb are much the same as any other.  It was erected at a prominent space in the landscape by the local community, which became a repository for the defleshed bones of the dead.  Placed communally within this space, the dead ceased to be individuals, and become instead anonymous ancestors.  This should not be seen as evidence of an undifferentiated society where all men (and women??) are considered equal.  The manipulation of these ancestral remains was probably carried out by a priviliged few, who were permitted to enter the tomb and carry out the required rituals on behalf of their community, while lesser beings looked on... 

If you want to read more on the subject, check out Fragments of Antiquity by John Barrett or Bronze Age Britain by Michael Parker Pearson, or anything by Colin Richards, Julian Thomas or Mark Edmonds (whose specialist subject is stone axes...)

Originally, the stone chamber would have been entirely concealed beneath a covering mound.  This has now eroded, leaving the characteristic 'dolmen' structure:-




The classification of these monuments is an art in itself, and careers have been made by various academics who characterised and mapped out the different types (see, for example, Earthen Long Barrows by Paul Ashbee, I think it is.  Sadly, my own personal copy (marked with my name on the flyleaf!!) got nicked from the Postgrad room in Glasgow Uni 20 years ago and I've never been able to replace it, but there are alternative sources available, including that splendid National Museum of Wales book The Tomb Builders which I reviewed previously in the blog.  Amongst the bewildering variety of forms available, there's the Cotswold Severn type, the Clyde-Carlingford type, the stalled cairn, the passage cairn, etcetera, etcetera.

All of which terms are applicable in the British Isles, so if you're an archaeologist wandering abroad in a foreign land, heaven help you.  You've bound to put your foot in it and completely misinterpret what you're looking at...

Nevertheless, I'm going to try.  I've not had that much experience of the French Neolithic.  I explored the megaliths of Britanny as a child and had the good fortune to dig on a Neolithic long barrow in Normandy for a couple of weeks as a postgrad.  Which would have been great fun, had Squire not just been diagnosed with navicular which meant that my thoughts were elsewhere...

Anyway, this one's interesting (NB: I have yet to find a chambered tomb or cairn that I would describe as boring!!) because it's similar to a stalled cairn, in that it comprises a single passage subdivided by stone sills along its length.  The supporting walls are largely made up of drystone walling (very Cotswold-Severn!!) interspersed with megalithic stones, which are graded in height with the largest ones in the centre of the passage, where the massive slab remains in place forming a roof:-





But what I found particularly interesting were the shaped slabs which allowed entrance into this central chamber.  They've been worked to form a circular hole, which would have made entering and exiting the space quite challenging, if not arduous.  Quite appropriate, really.  Venturing into the presence of the ancestors is not an exercise which should be undertaken lightly. 

These blocking stones also serve to screen this central chamber from the areas beyond:-

Could somebody please explain where the day actually went???

We took a leisurely stroll round the village this morning, then went out to the the nursery at Uplawmoor to buy some plants for one of J's gardening clients before heading to our usual cafe at Lochwinnoch for lunch.  I rather hopefully embarked on the trip with the intention of buying 'a couple of nemesia for the patio pots.'

Oh dear.  It's not for no reason that I say that plants are to me as shoes were to Imedla Marcos.  I got my nemesia alright - a dozen in total, plus some bright red verbena and some pink and white verbena.  Then I wandered around the nursery in a complete daze, wondering whether I'd died and gone to Heaven.  Or was it Hell...  Those of you who like your gardens, imagine if you will a garden centre, which has polytunnel after polytunnel after polytunnel, stretching as far as the eye can see.  There's a whole polytunnel devoted to paeonies...  A whole polytunnel devoted to hostas... Etcetera... 

Yes, you get the picture. 

We were hunting for coreopsis and geum.  We got the geum, but oddly enough, the one thing they didn't seem to have was the coreopsis.  They did, however, have four varieties of brunnera.  And so, since I'm a sucker for impulse buying, I thought I'd give Brunerra 'Jack Frost' another go.

This is the third time I've tried to establish a Jack Frost.  On both previous occasions, the slugs and snails munched at those pretty, succulent leaves faster than the poor plant could grow them.  The plants, on both occasions, were youngsters bought from mail order companies.  So I'm hoping that buying a fully established mature plant will mean it gets enough of a head start to beat the beasties.

I have my doubts, however.  My 'Dawson's White', which I bought a few months previously, is looking positively moth-eaten already...

Anywhere, here - for your delectation - is a pristine, lovely Brunnera 'Jack Frost', free of slug holes and snail-munching perforations.  [And, in case you're wondering, the white container in the top left hand corner is a slug pub...]




Stepping back a bit, the brunnera effect can be seen properly.  In the foreground is my well-established brunnera (which I think was a 'Looking Glass' which when it got established didn't look anything like how it was supposed to, but never mind.  I still love it!!).  'Jack Frost' is in the middle and 'Dawson's White' to the rear.  The miserable-looking laurel may not survive much longer (J is threatening it with destruction if it doesn't pull its metaphorical socks up) and the twiggy mess to the right is an unknown plant which we call George (the Bush...) because of its expansionist and imperialistic tendencies:-





Stepping back further, the full effect can be seen, with Rhododendron 'Hoppy' and Cousin It (a weeping silver pear) forming a backdrop.  We used to have a beautiful dark red broom bush in that area, but it didn't last very long, and we haven't replaced it.  Yet.  Something's going to have to replace George, though, who (or which) has achieved the dubious accolade of being the only plant in the garden that has been subjected to weedkiller in order to get rid of it.  Yes, we loathe it that much.  I tried to dig it up, five or six years ago, and it defeated me.  All in all, it's such an obnoxious customer that it requires a draconian treatment...





The other rhododendron in the garden is Rhododendron 'Dreamtime'.  Of course, it would have been looking a whole lot better if the fence had still been concealed beneath the vast expanse of clematis montana which used to grow here, but our wretched neighbour put an end to that, didn't they?  Grrrrr...




I also created another pot today.  I'd bought a new plant today - a heliotrope - because I thought it looked stunning and wanted to give it a try.  So I built the pot up around this new acquisition, adding a few nemesia and a bacopa and a purple calibrachoa for good measure:-

Hoorah.  The photographs have worked... 

My apologies for the quality of the images in this one.  It wasn't one of my successful ventures in the photography of standing buildings.  My camera was running low on juice and was grumpy as a result, and photographing churches which fall into this particular architectural style isn't always that easy...

The church of Saint Vincent in La Bastide de Saint Louis was a really tricky building to get into.  A plaque on the north door states quite clearly that it's an ancient monument, but whenever we went past it remained stubbornly shut.  I later questioned my hosts at the hotel, and the impression I got from them was that the building remained closed most of the time because it's in an unsafe condition.

But, because we'd visited over the Easter Weekend, it turned out that the church was open in order to fulfil that function for which it had been initially created - mass was being celebrated there.  Which meant of course that the building had to be prepared for the occasion, and it was possible to explore the place during that short period.

It did not disappoint, though the photos don't really do it justice.  Here's a view down the nave towards the choir, which is apsidal, just like the choir in the Cathedral of Saint Michael:-



I've tinkered with this photo to try and improve it, but it didn't really help much.  The figures at the left hand side do, however, give some impression of the vast scale of the place.

The interior was heavily decorated, with circular windows at a high level.  I keep wanting to call these 'rose windows' but I'm not sure if these really constitute proper 'rose windows' per se:-




A view of the south wall now, with its arched recesses, each containing individual chapels.  The capitals supporting the pillars are all decorated, with seems at odds with the otherwise austere interior:-





And the above photograph also gives a better impression of that really solid vaulting...

The west end has been modified to take an organ.  Once again, there's evidence of an internal stair (the window on the left) which must access the smaller of the two towers at the west end. What was sadly evident at this end, and which is almost visible in this photograph - look hard!!- is the unhappy condition of the fabric.  The vaulting is clearly suffering as a result of dampness, and there was a big crack in the masonry evident, too.  The complicated arrangement of the towers and gable must be taking its toll on this poor structure, and let's face, it's a pretty major problem which will be very expensive to fix.  Add to that the fact that there are three very substantial medieval church buildings (similar in size and character to this one) in La Bastide de Saint Louis alone, then the body responsible for the management and preservation of the building is facing a very major headache and a problem which certainly can't be resolved in the present economic climate....

Here's a conundrum.  Just HOW are you supposed to take decent elevation shots of an enormous church building which has been shoehorned into (yes, this statement is quite possibly true - it's probably contemporary with the surrounding building plots, at least, if not the structures which now stand upon them) the middle of a medieval planned town??

With great difficulty, is the answer.  Yes, I guess it's up there with milking hedgehogs in terms of its challenging status.

I promised you some pictures of the Church of Saint VIncent in La Bastide de Saint Louis, and here they are.  If you're prone to vertigo, don't look!

Like the nearby Cathedral of Saint Michael, the Church of Saint Vincent is of thirteenth century date.  It post-dates the Albigensian crusade and, again like the cathedral, it survived The Black Prince's torching of the town in the mid-fourteenth century.

It's a big hefty structure.  It's similar to the cathedral in a number of respects.  It has the rose windows at a high level for one thing, and its massive walls are supported by a series of flying buttresses:-





The entrance was beautifully gothic, and while it has been tinkered to some extent in the nineteenth century, there are some lovely original features.  Here's another vertiginous view:-

I just caught up with the last minute or so of the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition, which conjured up strange bittersweet memories of my teenage years as a keen, over-ambitious and completely starry-eyed French horn player.

I entered that competition way back in the mid 1980s, and managed to get through to the Scottish finals.  It was intense, it was stressful, and I was gutted that I never got further, but...  Looking back on it all, I wouldn't have swapped it for the world.

Throughout most of school years, I learned under the good-humoured guidance of Christopher Griffiths, who at that time played in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.  It was Chris who managed to convince me that I really wasn't blinkered enough to attend music college, and that university was the place for me. 

He was right, of course.

Back in those days, I had occasional lessons with another great musician, the one and only Ifor James.  My school weren't happy about letting me take time off to go travelling up north to Aberdeen three times a term for a music lesson, but my parents were supportive, at least.

Ifor's lessons were inspirational.  He had views on everything.  From historical novels to horse-riding, from archaeology to writing.  He was enthusiastic when I came swanning in with dreams of success and stardom as a soloist.  And he listened intently when I told him that I'd finally let go of my dream to play the French Horn in a professional capacity and that I'd decided to take up archaeology.  At a time when I was suffering under the dictatorship of a new teacher in my university days, he reminded me that I still loved the horn, and coaxed out of me some of the best performances I've ever done.  Some of the pieces I remember playing in his lessons were the Hindemith horn sonata, the Villanelle by Dukas, Beethoven's horn sonata and Strauss 1. 

And of all bizarre things, it was Ifor James who proved to be the common link which broke the ice when I was given the phone number of an eminent Scottish historian and expert on King James IV who just so happened to play the French horn and who was another ex-pupil of the Aberdeen Music School at which Ifor was a visiting professor.

I knew Ifor wasn't immortal, but through the years I've dreaded stumbling across his obituary.  As a result, I haven't really looked for it.  But seeing the YMOTY on the Beeb stung me into action, and tonight, I actually carried out the web-search I'd been dreading.

As I'd suspected, the world has indeed lost Ifor.  He died in 2004, the same year as my mother.  And just like my mother, it was cancer that claimed him.  They say things happen in threes: 2004 stole my mother (a talented amateur opera singer) and my Aunty O (a frustrated former professional opera singer), of course, but until tonight, I hadn't even realised that in this same cataclysmic year, I also lost one of the most influential mentors of my teenage years.

Ifor was always one for the ladies.  I'd like to think he was having a great time in the afterlife, chatting up my mum and my aunt and talking music in the company of the musical great and the good. 

What's even more peculiar is that Ifor prepared for his imminent demise by making a number of videos featuring his teaching tips.  So even now, his enthusiasm and his brilliance lives on. 

For those of you who are interested, here's a link:-


http://www.hornsociety.org/ihs-people/honoraries/57-ifor-james-1931-2004


Thanks, Ifor.  I might not be much of a French horn player these days, but I know full well that you helped shape me into the individual I am today...

Time for a garden post now.

It's that time of year again.  The time when the azalea and rhododendron are in their prime. 

I should probably have done a special feature on our azalea and rhododendron, but by the time I stopped footering around with the garden and got round to the photography, I'd lost a lot of direct sunlight and was limited in my choices for photographs. 

A view across the front garden now.  The big weeping silver pear on the corner is now in flower, and there are a few azalea and rhododendron visible in shot:-