On the Move

On Saturday, I packed my bags, said goodbye to Mme. Fabre and moved to my new digs in Eygalières, the next town heading south. While Mollégès was a quaint little town and the room I had was immaculate and charming, my new home is superior in several ways, but more on that later.

Sunday was a beautiful day so I elected to go on a 3 hr., 9 km hike that I had my eye on for a few days. The Twingo and I set out for Fontvieille, a few miles to the southwest.

Sur le Trace de Daudet

Alpohonse Daudet (1840-1897) was a Provence native from Nimes who, while educated as a lawyer, became one of Provence's best known writers of short-stories and novels. He lived in Fontvieille for a short while where he wrote one of his most renowned works Lettres de mon Moulin (Letters from my Mill). During this period, he lodged at the Château de Montauban (also along the hike) where he often took strolls past the four surrounding windmills. These mills inspired him to write Lettres, which is a collection of fictional letters and tales written by the narrator depicting the everyday life and struggles of the people of Provence.

Only one of the windmills still stands intact on a plateau overseeing the Rhône valley towards Tarascon. For a small fee you can go to the top of the windmill and in the small Daudet museum on the first level. I, of course, did neither. In fact, I had never heard of Daudet and had to read about him on the Internet just to write this much.

Le moulin de Alphonse Daudet

The same looking towards Tarascon.

Ruins of the aqeduct with an olive grove in the background..

Les sheep.

The aqueduct feeding the mill at Barbegal.

The final channel carved in the host rock leading to the mill.

The ruins of the eight mills at Barbegal.

Le Meunerie de Barbegal

At the furthest part of my hike, I approached the mill at Barbegal – the real reason for the undertaking. I mean Daudet is great and all that, but we’re talking ruins of a Roman engineering marvel here. The mill at Barbegal is estimated to have been built in the 2nd century and had eight churning grindstones. I read they could produce 9 tons of flour a day, enough to satisfy all 12,000 inhabitants of the Roman capital of Provence at Arles.

The water to power the mill was directed from the southern part of the Alpilles by 11 km of aqueduct. Some of the remains of the aqueduct still remain and are shown in the pictures above and top left. The water was fed through a channel carved into the rock of the hill (middle left) and plunged over the face of the hill to turn the water wheels that drove the grindstones of the mill (bottom left) the water then was channeled to the fields surrounding the mill to produce more wheat.

A brisk walk back to Fontvieille and it was off to the café for a pastis and a bite to eat. The French system of randonnée (hiking) trails is actually very well organized. There are the national long-distance Grand Randonnée trails and smaller regional and local paths. All are marked with distinctive colors and shapes. If you are on the trail, you’ll see a "–" in the color representing your trail. Each intersection or fork will usually have an "X" in the same color denoting that this is the wrong way. Abrupt changes in direction are marked with "L" indicating the appropriate direction. Sounds like a pretty simple system, except that they don’t use artificial signage, instead painting the markings on trees or rocks. So whenever you approach an intersection, you have to meander up each option slightly to find the appropriate marking being sure to look down around your feet as well as up at the trees. Several times, I’ve gotten slightly off track because I missed a marking. Slightly helping the situation are the books published detailing 30-40 trails in each department of Provence (Bouches-de-Rhône, Gard, Luberon, etc.). But it’s still a little tricky, especially when a hike requires you to change colored trails multiple times.

I find myself keeping a pretty close eye on the weather. Not that any of these pictures show it, but it has rained about half of the days since I arrived. Wind is also something to be wary of. If it blows from the south, it is warm and can actually carry fine particles sand from the Sahara. If it blows from the north through the Rhône valley, it can be bitter cold. This northerly wind is called a Mistral, after the most famous proponent of the Provençal culture. Nobel poet-laureate Frédéric Mistral is credited as single-handedly reviving the Provençal language with his poetry and established a foundation to keep the culture alive. So they honor him by naming a cold wind after him. Nice.

So anyway, I was glad to see the forecast predicting nothing but sunshine for most of the week. A colleague of mine told me it was because of an anticyclone over the south of France. I had never heard this term before, so I asked her what it was. She said, “It’s like a cyclone, but the opposite.” Well I wasn’t really sure what to make of that, so my interpretation based on the weather report on the news is that it meant a high-pressure cell. The point here being that the weather was going to be good for a few days, so I took advantage of it and left work early one day to take another hike.

I knew from Mme. Fabre that this week and the next were peak olive picking times. I had read about a hike that wandered through a number of olive groves in the areas around Mouriès where an estimated 80,000 trees are harvested each year. While there are wild olive trees in Provence, the variety grown in the orchards today throughout the region were introduced by the Greeks some 2,600 years ago. Marseille was actually founded by the Greeks as a major trading port called Massalia. It wasn’t until later that the Romans moved in and introduced vineyards.

From what I’ve seen, green olives come from the same trees as black olives, the black ones just being ripe. The oliviers (olive growers) harvest the olives by spreading a net around the tree and scraping the branches with what looks amazingly similar to those plastic rakes that kids use at the beach. Each tree is done by hand until the whole orchard has been harvested. The olives are taken to the press, and the first press produces the premium extra virgin oil. A second pressing with cold water yields extra fine oil, and a final press using hot water will produce a commercial olive oil. A single tree can produce as much as a gallon of olive oil.

The gentleman below and his wife are typical oliviers. By the way, I asked his permission prior to photographing him. In fact, his wife climbed down off of the ladder because she didn’t feel she was dressed appropriately for the picture. Little did she know it would end up on the Internet. Anyway, he and his wife have approximately 220 trees to harvest this year. It will take them about 2 full weeks. He asked me if I would be back next weekend to help, but I told him that I didn’t have the right work permit.