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Lauragais Blog

Inside a very special pigeonnier

30/7/2020

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A couple of months ago, a local historian told me about a pigeonnier which, he assured me, was the most fascinating example he had ever seen. Since then, I have been waiting for the harvest to finish so that I can take a look inside without trampling the farmer’s crops. Earlier this week, the monument’s owner – Monsieur Albouy – announced that my wait was over. I took a short drive over to Saint-Germain-des-Prés near Puylaurens, and then off we went across the stubble armed with a ladder and a camera.
​Built in the early 19th century, its most impressive feature is hidden from the motorists who speed past on the N126. Monsieur Albouy unlocked the door with a rusty old key, and we climbed inside.
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​All the other pigeonniers of this style that I have looked inside were fitted with wicker baskets or clay pots for the birds to nest in. In contrast, the four walls of M. Albouy’s pigeonnier are lined with 300 pigeonholes fashioned from local clay and a bamboo framework. These provided a safe and comfortable environment where amorous pairs of adult pigeons could raise their squabs, or baby pigeons. Safety in this context was short-lived, like the baby pigeons. Before the juveniles reached 28 days and might fly away, the big bad owner came along with a basket and stole them for his supper.
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​Writing in his seminal work on agricultural science published in 1600, Olivier de Serres tells us: ‘He whose home is provided with a pigeon tower…will never see his household short of food because [it] will provide him with fresh meat as surely as a well-stocked larder.’
Although M. Albouy still eats a few birds from his pigeonnier, for him, the greatest benefit is the pigeon manure which he shovels out of the door into a trailer and spreads on his vegetable garden.
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Roquefort – a high price for success?

24/7/2020

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I enjoyed a fascinating interview yesterday with Bernard Sirgue, mayor of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon. This tiny village in the south of France is famous for transforming ewe’s milk into blue cheese worth €350 million a year.
We discussed the challenges of administering a commune where 80% of the properties are owned by the world’s largest dairy group, most of the others are owned by six other cheesemakers, and all of these companies choose to leave the majority of their buildings uninhabited. This has resulted in fewer and fewer places to live, a dwindling population, the disappearance of every shop apart from the pharmacy, and a steady decline in the number of tourists coming to discover the village and its celebrated cheese.
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Monsieur Sirgue also told me about his ambitious project to revitalise the village before 2025, a year that will mark the centenary of Roquefort becoming the first French foodstuff to enjoy the protection of an appellation d’origine contrôlée (the first wine followed a decade later).
When I left the mayor’s office, the temperature outside was 32 degrees Celsius so I sensibly decided to go deep underground and visit the cellars where every single Roquefort cheese is ripened (all the cheeses in the photo are fake!)
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During my first visit to Roquefort a few weeks earlier, an abundance of shuttered windows had made me think everyone was still in bed. Then I noticed how few of the houses had letterboxes, and I began to delve deeper into its story. If the mayor has his way, Roquefort will become a more agreeable place to visit, but it is perhaps more fascinating and certainly more bizarre to wander its empty streets today. It certainly merits a chapter in my forthcoming book.
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Today is Bastille Day, France’s national holiday

14/7/2020

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I decided to commemorate the day by cycling through several centuries of French history. I crossed the Rigole de la Montagne a couple of times, built by Pierre-Paul Riquet in the 1660s to supply the Canal du Midi. I sped below the castles of Saissac, Lastours (below), Mas-Cabardès and Miraval-Cabardès (right), all besieged during the Albigensian crusade in the early 13th century. After a long climb, I passed through the fields around Laprade where the RAF dropped weapons to the Resistance during the second world war. A little further, I stopped at a monument to the 800-strong army of the Resistance that fought the Germans in this area in 1944. 
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The monument is also a mausoleum, and for the first time ever, the local mayors had decided to hold a Bastille Day celebration outside the crypt where 13 men of the Resistance are buried and where a 14th tomb awaits Louis Fourcade who was last seen alive on 6 August 1944 when the Gestapo were holding him prisoner in Revel.
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When the assembly learned that I was the famous écrivain anglais who had told the story of the Corps France de la Montagne Noire in his book, ‘Lauragais’, they asked if I would be kind enough to pose for a photo with them outside the crypt. In the interests of Anglo-French relations, I obliged, and then we chatted about Major Richardson, the British agent who had hidden in the surrounding woods and provided the radio link with London during the war.
I continued on my way and paused briefly for another photo in Les Escudiès where a stele commemorates the battle that took place on 20 July 1944 between the Resistance and German forces which included 1,500 infantrymen, several armoured vehicles and six Junkers 88s.
Vive la France!
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Those fine country smells

27/6/2020

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Travel through the countryside around Lautrec this weekend, and you can’t miss the pungent smell of garlic. The annual pink garlic festival may have been cancelled due to covid-19, but the harvest goes on and the air is rich with odours which make some people recoil and others go ‘yum’. or ‘miam’ if they are French.
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​Why doesn’t the pink garlic look pink in the first three photos? Because the bulbs hide their charms with modesty. Strip off their clothing layer by layer, and when you reach the last skin, the pink colour will shine through.  
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​The pink garlic of Lautrec also has a milder, more subtle taste than other varieties and it’s easier to digest raw. It carries the European Protected Geographical Indication label and can only be grown in the area around Lautrec, including in my village.
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Interview with a living legend

18/6/2020

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On Tuesday, I had the great pleasure of interviewing a living legend: Laurent Spanghero. At the start of our session, he told me, ‘People often say I should write a book about my life. If I did, it would be called “My Lives” because I have had so many different careers.’
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Spanghero is a name that may be familiar to you from rugby, cassoulet, the European meat industry, food scandals (unfairly, as you will discover if you read the rest of this article) or innovative foods that are 100% organic and 100% vegetarian.
Laurent is the eldest of eight children, and in the 1960s, he and three of his brothers played rugby for Narbonne, which in those days was a top flight team. His brother Walter won the Five Nations Championship three times with the national team, and a little more modestly, Laurent was the player-manager who led Castelnaudary to the third division national championship in 1974.
Four years earlier, Laurent had set up a meat business in Castelnaudary’s disused abattoir. ‘By 2005, we were making 7,000 tonnes of cassoulet each year, plus 2,000 tonnes of confit de canard, and 4,000 tonnes of Toulouse sausage,’ he told me. Laurent was the undisputed king of cassoulet, and the two earthenware bowls you can see on his desk in the first photo are cassoles which traditionalists use for cooking this emblematic dish. The following year, Laurent gave the business to his two sons, and they sold it in 2009.
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Unfortunately for the Spangheros, the new owners carried on using the family name. When the company was unmasked as the main villain in the great European horsemeat scandal of 2013, Laurent understandably took it rather personally. ‘Our name was dirt,’ he said. Unsurprisingly, the vilified company soon found itself with an empty order book and on the verge of collapse. ’For the honour of our family name, I decided to try to save it. My wife and sons thought I was mad. It was difficult, but I rescued the business and sold it again the following year.’
For many years, Laurent Spanghero was a well-known figure in the wider meat industry. In 1996 he became president of the French meat industry trade association and had to deal with the implications of a new disease that appeared that same year: bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease. Four years later, he began a decade as president of the European Livestock and Meat Trades Union, a trade body representing 20,000 meat-based businesses across the continent. But somewhere along the way, he became a flexitarian, and became increasingly absorbed by the question of how our planet is going to provide a balanced diet for a human population that is forecast to reach ten billion by 2050.
My next book is about food and drink in the south of France, and my intention is to give my readers a balanced diet of gastronomy, history, legend and local colour. But I also want to explore what innovations of today might become the traditions of tomorrow. This was the theme of the rest of my discussion with Laurent. In recent years, his research has taken him to many parts of Europe, Africa and the United States, and when he was in his 70s, he founded a start-up company called Nutrinat which uses a combination of germinated pulses and grains to produce foods with a protein content similar to the beef steaks he ate with such gusto in his rugby-playing days.
Laurent Spanghero is a man full of energy and ideas, and it was a great honour to interview him a few days after his 81st birthday.
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Anyone for roast pigeon?

24/5/2020

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​Yesterday, I enjoyed a fascinating encounter with Michel Lucien, the acknowledged expert on pigeonniers or dovecotes. In the 16th century, France had 42,000 of these buildings, constructed in an astonishing range of styles. There are still around 1,700 of them in my department of the Tarn alone.
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​In the Midi, they had nothing to do with racing pigeons or pigeon fanciers. Their main aim was to produce squabs, or baby pigeons, for the table. A modest pigeonnier with 200 nests could produce 60 a week, making the pigeonnier a reliable and valuable source of fresh meat. The babies spent their short lives (around 28 days) in pigeonholes made of wicker, wood or clay. In addition to their culinary attraction, the pigeons' manure was a highly-prized fertiliser used mainly in the vineyards, and for some owners, this was more important than the meat.
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​A few days earlier, I had visited Céline Taffarello who owns the Auberge du Poids Public hotel-restaurant in Saint-Félix-Lauragais. Her family has kept roast pigeon on the menu for over 30 years, and it has been eaten in her establishment by President François Mitterrand and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. No one quite remembers what Tony Blair ate when he booked a table, and I suspect that supermodel Margaux Hemingway ordered something lighter.
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​Visit Michel Lucien’s website for more, much better photos than mine..
​Or follow my example and buy one of his wonderfully illustrated books.
​michel lucien

​pigeonniers
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France in lockdown: time for virtual visits and armchair tourism

18/3/2020

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If, like me, you are not allowed to leave your home without good reason, all is not lost. Why not escape on a virtual visit to the Lauragais through the pages of a book? This part of France is blessed with an extraordinarily rich history and, except for the next 14 days, a vibrant present. When you reach Part IV - A Hundred Years of Misery, you may conclude that the current situation is not so bad, at least not from a historical perspective. Here is an extract from Chapter 18 of my book, Lauragais: Steeped in History, Soaked in Blood.
Chapter 18 - The Black Prince

At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Europe’s weather took a dramatic turn for the worse. Summers were unusually cold and wet, and it was often impossible to plough or sow or harvest or make hay. In the Lauragais, one historian estimates that between 1300 and 1346 there were twenty-five years when winter reserves were exhausted before the new crops were ready to harvest.  The worst period was the Great Famine of 1315, when somewhere between ten and twenty-five percent of Europe’s population died of starvation.
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It was during these times of hunger that the first citizens of Revel set to work and began to build their new town around the seneschal’s stake in the centre of the market square. They chopped down trees in the forest of Vauré and erected their timber-framed houses. From the safety of the new bastide they would be able to face the future with more optimism. The consuls had appointed guards to defend the town, and others to protect the crops in their orchards, vineyards and fields from marauders and wild beasts. One day soon they would find time to profit from Article 22 of the charter by raising ramparts and digging moats which they would stock with fish.
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I can picture members of the new bourgeoisie going about their business and meeting friends or neighbours at the market or in the street. Life would improve now, wouldn’t it? And indeed, the inclement weather that had so often ruined their agriculture since the start of the century began to improve. The rain clouds became less prevalent and the temperatures began to climb, and people dared to hope the worst was behind them. But there are Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and famine was not the only one who was circling the Lauragais. Death was always close at hand, and the Hundred Years’ War had rumbled away in the north for ten years and would soon come much nearer, but first came pestilence.
In Europe as a whole, the Black Death is believed to have killed a third of the population. The causes of the plague and its calamitous effects on society have been debated and documented elsewhere, so I shall restrict myself to observing that in Revel and much of the Lauragais, the epidemic reached its peak in the summer of 1348 and gradually died out the following year along with half the population. The plague took no notice of age, profession or position. In the space of a few short months, on average, half the mothers, half the children, half the bakers, half the butchers, half the carpenters, half the stonemasons, half the gravediggers, half the town guards were all dead.
The survivors barely had time to bury all the corpses and adapt to life with one-in-two people missing before another calamity hit the Lauragais. In the Book of Revelations war is represented by a red horse, but in 1355 it manifested itself in the shape of the Black Prince. The length of his visit could be counted in days, but the unforeseen effects of his subsequent actions would afflict the Lauragais for sixty years.
If you would like to read more:
buy LAURAGAIS online
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A morning run through 10,000 years of history

5/3/2020

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Why do I love the Lauragais and the Montagne Noire? Where else can you find a heritage trail that offers so much in such a short distance, not to mention seeing France’s most beautiful tree naked in the sunshine?
​08.15 – It’s spitting with rain but I’m convinced it won’t last. The high wall of a park provides some shelter; it belongs to the Abbey of Sorèze, founded in 754, turned into a Royal Military School under Louis XVI, and now home to the Dom Robert tapestry museum.
​08.45 – It’s windy on the limestone plateau above Sorèze. Perhaps I should take shelter in one of the many caves beneath my feet, such as the Grotte de Calel where my archaeology-speleology friends have found evidence of iron ore mining dating from the 11th century (this is a photo I took on another occasion!)
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​09.23 – I am on top of the world, looking out on the Lauragais and the Pyrenees from the Montalric orientation table (789 metres).
​09.36 – It’s a stony, gently-descending path through the forest that takes me past the forge and workshops of Grangevieille. Here, they preserve the ancient arts of metalworking, and this is the place to come if you need some ornate metal banisters for your staircase or a new chandelier for your château.
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​09.48 – I burst out of the forest into a clearing at Saint-Jammes where I eat a banana inside the ruins of a church founded in 1131. Next to me in this green forest glade stands the majestic beech tree of Saint-Jammes, 450 years old, voted the most beautiful tree in France earlier this year, and currently competing in the European Tree of the Year 2020 competition (the winner will be announced on 17 March). 
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​10.25 – I pause in my downhill dash to take a photo of the rusty remains of a charcoal burner’s kiln.
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​10.29 – It begins to rain. If I take a path on my left, I can shelter under a natural rock porch which, archaeologists have found, was used for similar purposes by my Neolithic ancestors. Instead, I press on and slither over a section of rock marked with deep grooves made by all the horse drawn carts that have passed this way over the millennia.
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​10.32 – I pick my way through the excavated ruins of the fortified village of Brunichellis, occupied between the 12th and 13th centuries.
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​10.33 – On TV this morning, the meteorologists promised rain by ten o’clock. Now I can see it sweeping towards me across the plain of the Lauragais. I up my pace along the earthworks of a fort built by the Gauls before the Romans arrived.
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​10.45 – It starts to rain, but I am close enough to the finish line not to care, and within minutes I am back in the abbey’s car park.
Can you beat a route like that? Twenty-one kilometres, although you can cut that down to around fourteen if you skip the orientation table.
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Preparing to give a talk on the Lauragais

13/2/2020

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There is a good reason why the Tuesday Club in Pézenas meets on a Wednesday, but I won’t explain it here!

Thanks for organising the event, Sandra Jones.
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From the Caucasus to Castres via the Red Army and the Wehrmacht

27/1/2020

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This post tells the extraordinary story of Vakhtang Sekhniachvili, and it follows on from my previous post of 11 January in which I visited the archives in Albi on a quest to identify a pair of dead German soldiers.
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During my visit, another document caught my eye. Dated October 1944, it listed the names of ten German soldiers killed and buried within the commune of Castres during the Occupation. What intrigued me were their bizarre names and even stranger places of birth: Georgia, Mongolia, Turkestan, Kyrgyzstan and the Caucasus
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What, I wondered, were men like these doing in the German army? 
I went in search of answers and soon came across various articles about one of these men: Vakhtang Sekhniachvili. Born in the village of Telavi in Georgia in the Caucasus, he was conscripted into a Soviet armoured regiment in 1941. A year later, his tank was hit while fighting in the Ukraine. He survived but became a prisoner-of-war (POW).
More than three million Soviet POWs are believed to have died in German custody – that’s around half of the total. Their deaths were caused by a combination of starvation, exposure, disease and executions. Vakhtang was among the several hundred thousand who chose to escape the deadly prison camps by joining the Wehrmacht. He was drafted into a unit called the Georgian Legion, and he was sent thousands of kilometres across Europe to Castres.
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By 1944, a large proportion of the ‘German’ troops occupying south-west France were ex-POWs like Vakhtang. They were known as Hiwis – an abbreviation of the German word ‘Hilfswilliger’ or auxiliary volunteer. They numbered around 600,000 in total, and the entire garrison of Castres consisted of Soviet POWs, apart from some 70 officers.
In July 1944, Vakhtang was posted north of Albi to guard the coal mines around Carmaux. He was soon in contact with the local Resistance, and during the night of the 3 and 4 August he helped organise the escape of 161 fellow-Georgians who then joined the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. Two days later the newly-swollen ranks of the Resistance were attacked by the Wehrmacht. Seven Georgians were among the 21 Resistance dead, but Vakhtang escaped unharmed. On 16 August he took part in the liberation of Carmaux, and by the end of the war in May 1945 he was known as Commandant Vania, and he led a group of 300 Georgians who had fought with the Resistance (some of them are shown in the two black-and-white photos).
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On 7 July 1945, he was awarded the French Military Cross and offered a post in the 1st Army under General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. Understandably, he chose instead to return to his home village of Telavi where he proudly displayed his French medals and was treated as a hero. For a while, even the authorities were impressed: he was promoted by the Communist party and put in charge of propaganda. Then came the Cold War and Stalin’s purges. In 1947, Vakhtang was arrested by the KGB in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, accused of being an imperialist spy, and of collaborating with the British and Americans. Pronounced guilty, his medals were confiscated and he was sent to the gulag. Most of the returning Hiwis met a similar fate or were executed.
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This period of forced labour lasted until Stalin’s death in 1953. Vakhtang was one of the first to be liberated, and many more of the surviving Hiwis found freedom under a general amnesty granted by Nikita Khrushchev in 1955.
Despite his new-found freedom, Vakhtang yearned for two more things: he wanted to visit France one more time, and he wanted his medals back. His first wish came true in 2003. At the age of 82, he revisited his former area of operations on a trip funded by the French Ministry of Defence and the Conseil Général du Tarn. Then, at a ceremony in Tbilisi in July 2006, he became the first Georgian to be awarded the French légion d’honneur.
Photo credits: thank you, Pierre Kitiashvili, for supplying the two photos. Pierre lives in Georgia, and his grandfather was the man on the motorbike in the first photo.
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    Colin Duncan Taylor, author of ‘Lauragais: Steeped in History, Soaked in Blood’, passionate about this undiscovered corner of south-west France.

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