I arrived at La Bastide Puylaurent at dusk. The village grew up around the railway junction linking Mende, Paris and Marseilles. Many hikers, walking along the Allier river in Stevenson's footsteps. It was 13 November, Robert Louis Stevenson's birthday.
Walking along the Allier in Stevenson's GR 70
footsteps
Nicholas Crane
Beyond
the door of the oven stood the clocher des tormentes, a granite obelisk topped
by a belfry hung with the bell which used to ring out the rhythms of La Fage:
the Angelus, weddings and funerals. But it took its name from its task of
guiding down men from the mountain on nights like the one I'd just spent, when
mist and wind were on the rampage. The bell of La Fage has lost its tone.
Children rang it one frosty winter's day and it had cracked in the cold.
The draille climbed up from La Fage through dripping, leafless silver birch and then heather, from cairn to cairn until 1500 metres, when the gradient eased and I met the full force of the gale. For ten minutes I shel- tered in a crevice on a weathered tor - Mad Dog Rock - while I organized my equipment for the forthcoming battle. The Col de Finiels was about twelve kilometres along the ridge of Mont Lozere from my tor, in bad weather about three or four hours' walking.
The track writhed from col to col through forest whose clearings were churned to quagmires by loggers' tractors. Wind and rain came in blasts which threatened to wreck Que Chova. From the waist down I was soaked to the skin; water squirted from the cuffs of my boots and mud reached to my knees. Checking the map, and setting a new compass bearing meant furling Que Chova while the wind tried to tear the map's plastic bag from my hand. Droplets streaming down my spectacles had to be wiped off before I could focus on the map's contours and measure distances to the next col.
In this
sightless state I reached the summit of Finiels late in the afternoon. A line of
wooden posts led down to the col where I met the tall stone posts that had
guided Stevenson up Mont Lozere from the north. He came up the warm, dry turf on
a sunny morning wearing his knitted waistcoat, with his jacket tied to
Modestine's pack. The posts had straddled Mont Lozere since medieval times,
spaced every fifty paces to guide travellers down from the heights. I touched
each one as I passed, wondering whether Modestine had loitered to scratch a rump
on the rough granite.
By
evening I was in the forest on the sheltered lower slopes of Mont Lozere looking
for the 'dell of green turf, where a streamlet made a little spout over some
stones to serve me for a water-tap'. This was the fabled bivouac described by
Stevenson in his chapter 'A Night Among the Pines', a panegyric upon the outdoor
life and in particular upon the joys of nights d la belle etoile. 'What seems a
kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains', he mused,
'is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.'
So many self-conscious Stevensonians have already poked about in this wood that I half expected to bump into knots of young men puffing meerschaums, with TWAD open on page 172 and clutching twitching divining rods. I found the dell, or at least I found a dell which would do. The young trees surrounding his camp-site were now statuesque Scots pine and in the calm of the evening I knew why Stevenson had spliced into his chapter the sequestered-bower quote from Paradise Lost.
Dawn broke and I lay
in my sleeping-bag postponing the moment when I would have to pull on my wet
trousers.
For the next two days I was buffeted by hailstones as I followed Stevenson's route north from Mont Lozere through milder country whose roofs now wore tiles not slates. But his footsteps became fainter and less interesting. And I grew bored with his company and that of a route whose charm had now been buried by bitumen.
Hounded by a hail squall I arrived at La Bastide Puylaurent at dusk. The village grew up around the railway junction linking Mende, Paris and Marseilles ("le Cévenol") and became popular between the wars as an accessible summer resort for those driven inland by the heat of the Mediterranean coast. In the winter they came to ski. Hotel Ranc ('Pension de Famille: Alt. 1024 metres') was built in 1926 beside the railway line.
After
the Second World War La Bastide Puylaurent faded back into the forests. For a while the
village subsisted on the custom of workers from the railway and from local
dam-building projects. Hotel Ranc became a holiday home for old soldiers who had
served in Algeria. Now it was a gite d'etape run by the young and immensely tall
Philippe Papadimitriou
Demaitre Pausenberger Vanniesbecq, a Belgian-Greek whose grand-father once owned
the Hotel de Paris in Cairo. After a series of occupations, from gold-panning in
California to hod-carrying in Peru, Philippe had bought the Hotel Ranc, complete
with its conteats, from the bed-spreads to the oak-and-chrome Frick
refrigerators.
'It was intuition, not science !' Philippe laughed. 'Voila !' La Bastide Puylaurent was dying. The winter population was down to 183. In summer it swelled to 2000, with the extra railway staff and the villa-owners from Marseilles, Ales, Nimes and Montpellier. Each year fewer residents stayed up for the winter. Philippe's girlfriend, Catou, remembered coming up to La Bastide Puylaurent as a girl to collect mushrooms, from her home in Ales, before all the pits closed. The branch line to Mende was losing money and, if that closed, La Bastide Puylaurent might disappear from the map. There was pessimism in the village; one of the other hotels had closed recently; marriages were disintegrating.
But the
gite "L'Etoile"
was booming: the previous year Philippe had catered for 2000 guests. Many hikers, walking along the Allier
river in Stevenson's footsteps. It was 13 November,
Robert Louis Stevenson's birthday.
Philippe cooked pied de mouton mushrooms from the forest and we played darts by the open fire.
'The gite is too much ... sedentaire; I must do something where I move.' Philippe stared into the flames. 'We are good for something, but what... it is difficult to know.'
'For my part,' wrote Robert Louis Stevenson the day before he
walked through La Bastide Puylaurent, 'I travel not to go anywhere, but to go; I travel for
travel's sake.' The line is so well-worn that, like the mountaineers' aphorism
'Because it's there', it's almost lost its meaning. Stevenson's claim to
fulfillment through aimlessness seemed to me a contradictory, impossible ideal.
It wasn't till I read his journal that I realized he'd lopped off the end of
this passage when he rewrote the text for TWAD. After 'I travel for travel's
sake', he had added in the original: 'And to write about it afterwards...' From "Clear Waters Rising" A mountain walk across
Europe by Nicholas Crane (Penguin Books)
Buy the book
Old romantic Hotel, L'Etoile Guest-House is a mountain retreat in the South of France. With a beautiful park along the Allier River, L'Etoile Guesthouse is located in La Bastide Puylaurent between Lozere, Ardeche and Cevennes. Many hiking trails like GR70 Stevenson trail, Regordane way (St Gilles trail), GR7, GR72, GRP Le Cevenol, Roujanel, Margeride loop and Allier river trail. The right place to relax.