Come stroll with me...

... through les Villages Morts...

As promised in my last post I'm back here on Mont Mimat, the mountain that overlooks the city of Mende from the south.  The view of the city from the Lot valley side of Mimat is quite spectacular.  The road winds towards Séjalan - an area of the city that I used as a location in my last story, Marseille.  But you can make out the basilica in the centre of the old heart of the city and the old bridge on the Lot.  There is also an abandoned village here, La Chaumette.

The name Chaumette has exisited as a family name from early times in the Languedoc.  But if you check a modern dictionary, you will find the noun chaume which means stubble or scrubland.  The word is also used to describe the thatch of a cottage.  The village is sited by a water source and is the remaining vestige of a hard caussenade life.  The lintel on one building has a date from the 17^th century, so there have been people living here for at least 400 years, probably much longer than that.  The families that lived here would have tended sheep and sold the fleeces for wool. The area is harsh and at that time would have been mostly scrub land on limestone.  The houses are built of limestone blocks with thinner slabs to create stone floors inside and with smaller tiles crafted to create a solid roof.  In the mid-nineteenth century there were 26 inhabitants in the village.  By 1904 this had dwindled to a single family.

If we take a short climb and head a little further south on Mimat we can find the remains of the second village, Le Gerbal.  There is a second water source here, but this village is the less well preserved of the two.  The houses are of the same design and material as in La Chaumette.  There were around a dozen buildings in this village in the 1850s.  By 1905, the population had reduced to only one inhabitant.  The villages were abandoned and the slopes of Mont Mimat were later forested with Austrian pines.

Snow on the morning of September 27th

Life must have been desperately hard for those villagers.  Here in the Cévennes, the summer months can be blisteringly hot, what little grass there is, can be bleached white and the winters can be freezing cold especially when the wind blows in from the north.  I've known it snow here at the end of September and I can recall Madame at my favourite camping spot telling me that the last fall of snow that year had been at the beginning of May.

The sense of isolation up here is something that you can't seem to escape.  It was that sense of isolation, the harsh landscape and the remains of les villages morts that convinced me that Mont Mimat would make an excellent location for a story.   My fictitious village of Mercœur, is modelled on the remains of the village of Le Gerbal and sits a couple of hundred metres further down the trail.

You can find out more about Mercœur Here and Here and I will be catching up with Jacques Forêt himself here on the blog next week.  Watch this space! 

The book is available for pre-order from Amazon