St. Victor La Coste
Le Castellas (backside view)
La Pont Du Gard (click on image for French pictoral tour).
La Sabranenque is a twelth century castle located just above the southern French village of St. Victor la Coste. It is also a volunteer program dedicated to restoring that castle along with other medieval and Roman-era structures in the south of France and northern Italy. Volunteering for La Sabranenque is a pretty sweet deal. In exchange for putting in four hours of grunt work each weekday morning (this grunt work includes everything from toting buckets of dirt to helping set the table for lunch), visitors get two weeks of discount food and board in the heart of Provence. Not bad.
Tracy and I heard about Sabranenque through a friend of Tracy's. She went there in 2000 and, even though her arms are as thin as pipe cleaners, didn't complain too much about the manual labor aspects of the trip. Whatever pain she felt, the friend reported, was quickly soothed by the free red wine they pour out at lunch and dinner.
This friend showed us a couple pictures which, like most vacation snapshots, gave only the merest hint of the region. What really sold us, I suppose, was the notion of visiting the south of France for two weeks and not blowing our entire savings in the process.
To get to St. Victor La Coste, we took a plane to Charles de Gaulle and tranferred to the TGV heading south to Avignon. I have a hard time sleeping on planes, so I spent the bulk of the TGV ride nodding off. The transition from the flat Parisian outskirts to the hilly midland to the rugged hills of the Provence was pretty gradual if I recall. In the last hour, you get a great view of the French Alps, looking up to Grenoble. Aside from that, however, I was mostly impressed by the relatively untrammeled state of the French countryside. Five thousand years of agricultural exploitation and two hundred years of industrial exploitation have done little to mar the passing hills and valleys. Were it not for the concrete and steel TGV viaduct passing through, one could almost believe you were viewing the land as it looked back in the Roman area. Then again, my knowledge of French development patterns is pretty limited. For all I know, the presence of the TGV might be why the surrounding countryside looks so underdeveloped. Sort of like how interstates in the U.S. generally route around the cities and suburbs.
Anyway, that's literally the armchair introduction to the south of France. When we finally got off the train in Avignon, we'd found that the temperature had crept up a good 20 degrees and that the limited shade, coupled with the dry, rocky soil, only made things feel hotter. We sat around for about 30 minutes, waiting for our ride to St. Victor. During that time, we met up with the other volunteers (easily identifiable by their pale skin) and exchanged the usual kind of banter one exchanges with people you just met.
After a trio of telephone calls, our driver eventually showed up. A hippy-ish guy named Gael, he gave us a warm hello and led us to a slightly disheveled van with no air conditioning. For the next 45 minutes, we drove along winding roads, leaving the heat and traffic of Avignon quickly behind. St. Victor wasn't as chilly as Paris, but it looks out over the southern end of the Rhone Valley. As a result, it tends to bear the brunt of the mistral, the winter wind that still managed to creep up in the early mornings and late afternoons even though it was already June. The driver noted the sturdy walls and smallish windows on the northern side of passing houses. Both were a tactic used by local architects to minimize wind exposure since the middle ages.
I would say since the Roman area but one thing we later learned is that the term "dark ages " has a very real meaning when it comes to southern french architecture. You can still see evidence of Roman design -- the Pont du Gard near Nimes being the classic example -- but as Roman civilization went into speedy collapse during the fifth, and sixth centuries, it took down with it all the local knowledge on how to build decent, durable structures. When we visited Pont du Gard later in the week, we also took a look at some stone huts built by local shepherds to protect their sheep from the wind. Dating back to the 500-1000 period, the huts betray little evidence of mortar or metal tool use. They basically looked like hollowed-out rockpiles and were probably about as comfortable. I'm not sure if locals ever lost the knowledge of how to mix mortar. Considering how far back that art goes, I think it's doubtful. Still, one reason you don't see too many structures from the latter half in the first millennium is that almost anything built from that period lacked durability.
By the end of the first millennium, the local craftsmen had regained enough skill to build sizable walls. This is about the time the first castle keeps start to emerge on strategic promontories. As taught in every world history class, these keeps formed the political centers of gravity in the emerging feudal system. The lord who built the keep could press local peasant work crews into shoring up or augmenting the castle structure. St. Victor, like most cities of the period began its life on a hill, all the better to preserve the fertile bottom land and fend off the occasional Frankish, Magyar or Burgundian invasion. Around about 1100 AD, local residents built le castlellas (the provencal term for castle which residents still use when referring to the structure). It sits at the very top of the the hill, about 1,000 feet off the valley floor, and it took a bit of a hike to get there each morning. Subsequent builders created a shorter defensive wall running in a nautilus shell profile from the castle to the base of the hill. This wall would provide a back wall for a more conveniently located village at the base of the hill. You'd think the peasants would build their houses inside the wall, but the opposite was true. Most of the homes at the hill's base were stone constructions cemented to the wall on the outside. This created a cool wasp-nest look. These subsidiary structures were the first thing repaired by the original Sabranenque volunteers and currently serve as dormitories for the volunteers who come in and help restore the castellas farther up the hill.
I make repeated mention of stone and cement, because that's what the guys who run Sabranenque are really into. In France, you can get out of your military commitment by registering as a conscientious objector and volunteering with the national restoration program (or so I was told). A lot of the veteran volunteers were hard-partying hippy types who had me instinctively sniffing for traces of the ganja weed. Once you got them talking about construction, however, it was like they all turned into French, cigarette-smoking versions of Bob Villa. Most are legitimate stone masons who consider their work an extension of the medieval craft skills that made the village possible in the first place. This leads to an interesting conservation ethic. Unlike an archeological dig, where volunteers are trained to treat each artifact as if it was a piece of evidence at a crime scene. Sabranenque volunteers see nothing wrong with assigning a dozen laborers to dig around, to pull out rocks and, eventually, to use those rocks to reconstruct a collapsed wall or foundation. In some cases the new walls serve only as short placeholders, a visual reminder of what stood where in the 12th century. In other instances, however, crews will pull out the scaffolds and build a real wall, course by course.
During my second week, I was lucky enough to get assigned to one such crew. While my wife toted buckets of dirt (much to her chagrin), I was learning how to mix mortar, how to select and shape rocks and how to pace my rock-setting so that the trio of courses you just spent four hours cementing into place doesn't collapse on the last hammer tap. I wasn't nearly as good as the lead guys, of course, but I found it an addicting exercise. Since returning to the states, I've yearned for a similar program. A masonry club of New York City, perhaps. If middle aged guys can go to baseball camp and pretend to be a member of the Yankees for seven days, I don't see why it's crazy to go spend a week building rock walls. If you know of any such programs that offer this kind of thing, let me know.
The wall we were building belonged to the castle's chapel. The old wall had collapsed apparently, leaving a 20 to 30 foot void up to the chapel roof. We only managed to throw up 12 courses, about six feet worth of new wall, but the pace was quick enough that I'm more than confident they completed the reconstruction within a month of our departure.
In the course of rebuilding this wall, I came to appreciate the lead volunteers' perspective. At first, it felt like we were tampering with history. Once you actually start mixing the sand and lime to create the mortar and started searching out rocks solid enough to form a straight line course, however, you came to realize that castle construction was like any other anonymous folk art. The original peasants weren't trying to build the Taj Mahal. They were trying to build a functional structure that could shield them the next time a band of knights came rolling in from the north.
Unfortunately, the Sabranenque website doesn't provide too much history to fill out the analogy. The same goes for the project's onsite library (a major disappointment). Still, the volunteers who headed up the daily construction crews were more than happy to rattle off facts, provided you were willing to let them do it in French. Here's what I could glean from their lectures: The castle was built by a noble family, called the Sabran. They were related to the Count of Toulouse, and they set up the castle on a hill that overlooks the road connecting the Rhone River Valley with the market town Uzes. This was a strategic location since the count's dominions in Languedoc lay just beyond. According to my tutors, the castle never came under attack. It did, however, come up on the wrong side in the power politics of the 15th century. The Languedoc was a perrennial hotbed of rebellion and religious heresy during the middle ages. For a moment, I thought the structure might have gotten caught up in the Vatican-declared holy war against the Cathars, a heretical group that once flourished within the Languedoc region. Alas, the reason for the castle's destruction was far more banal. Apparently, one of the early Bourbon kings, knowing that the primary challenge to the throne would come from the south (as the Bourbons had), demanded that Sabran destroy the castle as both a show of fealty to the royal family and a show of distance to his Toulouse relatives. Sabran voluntariliy blew up or dismantled portions of the castle walls, leaving only the strongest portions (the southwestern corner was built to withstand a sustained catapult attack) to survive the elements over the next six centuries.
If I've gotten this totally wrong or if anybody out there reading this has information that can improve upon this recounting, please pass it along. I will update it with credit. In the meantime, this site offers a touch more history.
When we weren't working on the castle, we were most likely eating. Sylvain, the new chef at the time was an excellent cook. My wife rolled her ankle early in the second week and wound up spending much of her mornings in the kitchen. She's copped a few meals from the experience, a fringe benefit you don't get from most vacations. About every third day we had a meal that consisted of leftovers. In most instances the leftovers were fine, but during the second week, my wife and I took the opportunity to eat dinner at one of the restaurants in the neighboring village. If we go back, we'll probably do that even more. Good food is, of course, one of the reasons you go to a place like France and a few dollars spent in the local bars and restaurants is good for the local economy.
The town of St. Victor La Coste is quiet. It boasts a sun-drenched square which doubles as a parking lot when couples come into town on the weekend to get married at the quaint town hall. It has two bars, L'Industrie and L'Epicurean. Neither are much to speak of. We spent most of our time at L'Industrie, coming into frequent contact with the three regulars who hang out at the bar and, if I were to judge by America behavior standards, seem to be engaging in some sort of sub rosa activity. This was during the World Cup, so one of the high points of the trip was watching Les Bleus stink it up on TV. Another highlight was watching England beat Argentina. The town seems to attract a lot of winter home owners. We took a tour around the outskirts and noted the gaudy nature of the new houses (big pools, satellite dishes, California-style architecture). We also noted all the places for Petanque and all the grave stones in the cemetary that made allusions to the game. Apparently, they take their bowling very seriously down there. Oh yeah, we also noted the sizable number of tombstones dating to the 1914-1918 period. The town square boasts a statue of a generic Poiluwith La Patrie at the base. Yet another reminder that the French, for all the modern day jokes about Germans marching through Paris, have given their share on the battlefield. If America ever lost 11 percent of its population in a single half-decade, I guarantee you. There would be more than the occasional statue to commemorate that loss.
Highlights of the trip: Buying a bottle of delicious, $5 Cote du Rhone at the local Proxi each afternoon and drinking it on the terrace overlooking the Rhone Valley. Checking out a 2,000 year old Roman castrum at Gicon and entering a cave with evidence that pre-Roman Celts used it for ritual worship. Sylvain's beef stew. Learning how to curse in French when a rock falls on your foot or you find you left the hammer at the bottom of the ladder ("putain!").
Drawbacks: Asshole Americans who refuse to make even the slightest attempt to speak French at the dinner table (or offer interesting conversation in English for that matter. I found myself gravitating to the one or two Canadians whose semi-Francophone upbringing made them the informal rescuers of most conversations). Overall lack of historical info about the site and region. Not having enough time during the work days to make ambitious side trips to the coast. Having to work in the rain even when the work becomes essentially futile (as one of the aforementioned Canadians quipped as we were maneuvering stones on a muddy path, "Isn't this the reason our ancestors emigrated in the first place").
Indeed, one of the better things about the Sabranenque experience is that it gives you a newfound appreciation for what immigrant laborers go through in our own country. One thing you quickly learn is that manual labor doesn't require an extensive vocabularly. Lots of imperative voice (regards! faites attention!), lots of repeated request (la malette, sil vous plait), and, of course, the ever useful qu'est-ce que c'est? Everything else requires a little more work, but then going to any foreign country requires a little more work. I'm already looking forward to going back.