Saturday, September 28, 2013

The Brittany Coast and Goodbye to Europe – by Gary




The Brittany Coast
I have always wanted to explore the Brittany coast, but as our time had ran short we could only briefly visit Dinard, St Malo and Le Mont St Michel.  It was however a fine sample of this famous coastline.

Dinard
Dinard is quite obviously an ‘old money’ town, a beach retreat for wealthy Parisians, and the ‘beach architecture’ there is pretty amazing.

The Dinard beach


A house? I guess this could be a small hotel or guest house.

But these looked distinctly like your average ‘pots of money’ beach shacks

.
There were hundreds of them, gorgeous old places.

St Malo
A walled town, but with a spectacular waterfront location, it’s another ‘old money town’.

The tidal range on this coast is huge, the currents strong, there are off-shore rocks everywhere, the weather is often severe and just to make life interesting there are frequent fogs.  Brittany sailors and fishermen are legendary.

St Malo’s defenses had to be strong to keep out those bloody Poms.

Even the off-shore rocks are heavily defended.


But how’s this for a cool hotel?


The shops and cafes are very, very chic.

Le Mont St Michel
This island monastery was our last major stop in Europe.  A big conservation project was underway, so it was a bit of a construction site, but still spectacular.

Seen from afar in a rolling landscape??!

Closer up – those monks obviously wanted security and solitude!


The town at the foot of the island is Hollywood mediaeval.

 
And Zeke correctly identified the light, soaring majesty of the church transept as Gothic – well done Zeke.



From high up in the monastery you can get a sense of the scale of the conservation project underway.  The monastery island sits in a large bay that is gradually silting up – this massive project aims at changing the nature of the in and out flows of the river at the head of the bay to gradually flush the accumulated silt from around the island.  It’s a World Heritage site and a major tourist draw-card – but it still seems a far-sighted investment.

 

Bye Bye Europe
After two plus months of camping and freeloading off friends, relatives and complete strangers it was finally time for us to head off back to Trinidad.  We want to thank everybody who helped make our European trip such a very special time.  Ciao.

Zeke and Nina’s tent was twice as big as ours!

Turning our European hire car in at Calais before heading back to England and Gatwick airport.  It was a sporty little car and very economical to run.

 
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Friday, September 27, 2013

The Dark Ages - by Zeke




In the Dark Ages if you were a Lord or a King and someone annoyed you, or you needed more land, you would raise an army and attack your neighbor. These constant battles and sieges led to heavily fortified towns! This blog-piece shall look at who and why you have an enemy, and what you need to do to stop them killing you.

Your Enemy
To start this section I am going to pick on the Pope.  Not the new one but one from awhile back, who laid siege on a town near Carcasone in France and killed six thousand women and children. Why, you might ask, he did this? Well the Pope simply wanted to punish them for not being faithful.

A hill top town, The remains of a wall can still just be seen.


In Italy, in Tuscany there are famous hill-top towns which are surrounded by walls with turrets placed at strategic places. These walls were to keep your neighbors from stealing your grain or pillaging your home.

Arguments between Lords such as, “Who is the richest?” or “Who has the most land?” often resulted in conflict. The place of modern day lawyers was filled by knights who lopped off the heads of who ever they thought wrong. So hopefully you understand medieval politics and have not been inspired to hire a knight as your lawyer.
A mediaeval lawyer.

Fortifications
Walls of around three meters thick and ten meters high are normal. Wall height is often enhanced by large, sheer sided ditches or cliffs. The weak point in a wall is the gate, so gates were placed in a gate-house in sets, one behind the other and often iron clad. The gates always have a gap between them so they could trap people and drop rocks on them through murder holes in the ceiling of the gate-house. Arrows would also be fired through slits in the walls of the gate-house.

The enhanced height of walls by cliffs.


This set of gates is preceded by a draw bridge.  This is clever because when the draw-bridge is up and you want to batter in the gate it is difficult because effectively the gate is suspended in mid air. After the draw bridge there was a portcullis (an iron grill that slides up and down in a groove in the stone) and then two sets of thick wooden doors. The gates are about five meters apart.  Gates might be a weak point but they are heavily defended!


Arrow slits in wall. The arrow slits are not for decoration!

If a town was rich it would have more towers and better armed men. In small villages every man would become a warrior if necessary. In large wealthy trading towns there would be a fully trained well armed garrison. Besancon, a famous fortress that looks like a film set for a fairy tale, has an ideal garrison of three thousand men to guard two walls and a keep.

London Tower’s amoury.


An ideal fortress has three defenses with at least one of those surrounding the town and a keep (a place of last retreat) that houses the riches and rations of the town. The wall is thick and tall and has a moat or ditch at its base. The Crenellations over hang the wall slightly and are made of brick instead of stone. Why brick instead of stone? Well, if shot from a catapult hits the stone it shatters sending shards every which way. Brick, if it receives a shot, crumbles absorbing the impact of the projectile. An ideal place for castle is to have the keep on a hill and the town on the bend in the river so as to be able to use the river as a moat. If the town is in a valley they would have good access to fertile soil, improving their crop.

Double outer wall.


The Keep, the Castle within the Castle.


Over hanging crenellations.


If any of the information is wrong pleas tell me and no one else, thanks. In this report I have told you about what started sieges and who might attack you if you’re not faithful. In my third paragraph I told you what makes for the best fort. Having done what I set out to do I say good bye.

I observe my empire.


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Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Carnac and Le Calvaire – by Gary


 

Carnac
Carnac is a Mesolithic (10,000 to 5,000 BC) and Neolithic (5,000 to 2,000 BC) cultural site, a sort of French Stonehenge, featuring huge stone alignments and burial mounds.  It was impressive, but our spoilt children reckon it wasn’t a patch on Stonehenge.

Some of the rocks are large, weighing several tons. 


And just like at Avebury, there are small villages and scattered farm houses standing in the midst of these ancient rocks.


The alignments are extensive, extending for several kilometres.


At Carnac we have our first taste of the windswept Atlantic coast – even on a calm day like this the low grey sky and rock strewn shore-line gives it a forbidding edge.



Le Calvaire
I couldn’t even get Vicki and the kids out of the car for this one (it was a cold, wet early morning) – but I loved it.  A tiny little village, barely a speck on our road map, but such Christian ardour.

This is the tiny little church at Le Calvaire, it is set in a large park.


And in the park are a series of life size sculptures presenting the 14 Stations of the Cross.


They are beautifully done!


Quite extraordinary!


I reckon the detailing in these works is impressive.



The hill of Calvary in relation to the church.
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Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Arles, Carcassonne and Le Eyzies – by Gary



Arles
Arles is an old Roman city, and it has lots of Roman sites including an amazingly intact amphitheatre, and ruins of a theatre, temple, bridge and aqueducts.  However for a while in 1888-9 it was also the home of Vincent Van Gogh and he used several of the town’s sites as inspiration for his work.  We visited the city specifically to do a self-guided walk of several of the places where Vincent put up his easel.

Le Jardin de la Maison de Sante: in Vincent’s day this was apparently a psychiatric hospital, and is where Vincent admitted himself after fighting with his friend Paul Gauguin, cutting off an ear in the process.  Vincent suffered terribly from depression.


Le Cafe “Le Soir” (Cafe Terrace at Night).


L’escalier du Pont de Trinquetaille (The Trinqueataille Bridge).  Vincent’s physchiatrist considered that Vincent’s painting was good therapy, a good outlet.  It is said he only sold one painting during his entire painting career.


La Nuit etoilee (Starry Night over the Rhone).


La Maison jaune (The Yellow House):  This painting is of Vincent’s Arles home (he shared it with Paul Gauguin for a while), but his yellow house was destroyed by a world war bomb.  You can see the building behind in his painting is still intact.


Les Arènes (Spectators in the Arena at Arles):  You can’t see the actual location for this work, because it is only open during bull-fights...

... this is the bullfight location, the ancient Roman amphitheatre – these events are held here to this day – this part of France being heavily influenced by Spanish culture.

Le Jardin public (The Public Gardens).  Vincent committed suicide only a couple of years after leaving Arles.

After his death Vincent was finally recognized as one of the truly great artists of his day.  You can’t help but wonder if recognition had come during his life whether it would have given him the sense of self worth and purpose to cope with his depression.

We really enjoyed this little excursion in to the world of post-impressionism (a word we learnt at Musee D’Orsay, although we haven’t really a clue what it means).

Carcassonne
This World Heritage site is a somewhat controversial mediaeval walled city; controversial because, while it authentically presents typical defense systems from the era, by the 19th century it was in bad shape, and had to be extensively restored, and some consider it unlikely to be a particularly faithful restoration.  Thankfully, it did little to detract from our enjoyment.

From a distance the town walls have a fairy-tale character...


.. and as you get closer it only gets better (its restoration was not particularly recent, it commenced in 1853).


The town is protected behind two walls with elaborate defenses on each...


archer slits, murder holes, drawbridges, portcullis etc.


and of course moats (well once anyway).


Within the town walls there is a keep, also heavily defended behind two more walls and another moat – the timber ‘hoarding’ shown here was rapidly deployed if an attack was imminent, placed in prepared slots in the stone-work.  It provided a superior defensive platform for archers, stone throwers, boiling oil tippers and so on.


The town also features some very cool shopping.  This is a lolly shop – 
it certainly drew in Zeke and Nina to part with some pocket money.


Les Eyzies de-Tayac
The hilly area around this town is underlain by soft limestone which is often exposed at the surface as cliffs, cliffs that are honey-combed with natural caves.  Because the rock is soft, villagers often cut back in to cliff edges, almost certainly(at least to begin with) taking advantage of pre-existing caves, to place their houses partially within native rock.

You can see at least one of the houses above is more ‘in’ the cliff than out.  

We learnt the locals have been utilizing these limestone caves for a seriously, seriously long time.   Here is the story

About 10,000 to 15,000 years ago the local fauna was quite different.  For a start there was a lot more of it, and there were some surprising species, including lots of wild horses.

And there were ibex ...

... herds of bison...

... amazing wooly rhinoceros ...

... and perhaps most surprising of all, wooly mammoths.

In the early twentieth century, following up on reports from locals, academics from Paris came to investigate some of the caves.

And we got to follow in their footsteps.  They only allowed six visitors at a time into this cave, accompanied by a trained guide (she was excellent).  Strictly no photos, no touching the cave walls, it’s a World Heritage site, fragile and carefully protected.


And deep within the cave there they all were, preserved as beautiful works of art etched in to the soft rock by human artists at least 12,000 years ago.


The artists must have spent ages studying the contours of the caves interior, because their work utilizes the lumps, bumps and fissures to give their work a strong 3D aspect that you really can’t see in these tracings.


The depiction of horses was the most common, but also deer and bison herds.  We did get to see mammoths and one rhino. The depiction of human figures in this era was apparently very rare – but we also got to see one.

We all got extremely cold while in the cave, we just didn't have appropriate clothing, and came out shaking to defrost in the car with the heater on full. Despite the cold this was one of Nina’s favourite European sites.  It really was intriguing to imagine early man crawling deep within this cave with primitive torch lights, to spend hundreds of hours creating these amazing drawings.  Why? What was the impetus?
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