Philobiblon

I just put a very muddy pair of jeans into the washing machine. This explains how they got that way…

I am writing this in a guardpost on the mur de le pest. Part of a ring of fortifications built to keep the plague out of the bulk of France in the 18th century, after it broke out in Marseilles. The guardroom is still totally watertight; it’s 2m thick at the base, the walls really rock solid but without cement – only plaster on the inside to block the wind.

That’s handy, since it is raining quite heavily outside. But even the ancient chimney, just a hole in the corner of the roof now since it has lost its hood, is letting in barely a drop, so well designed is it, and though it looks like it still draws, since the local youths obviously use this as a den, and the old fireplace as a cooker.

The walls rise straight to about six foot then it looks like there was a second story of wood and a door to directly access that from the ‘clean’ side of the wall. The floor level entrance door may have opened out into a vestibule area after the first wall gate, reached by a mere goat track from the plague side. There’s a ruined building on the other side, perhaps half the size of this.

At the floor level the walls start to curve inward, at first gently, then more rapidly and large flat stones about 4ocm wide and of varying lengths fill the gap. The builders made life easy on one side by using the natural rock – although chipped into neat straight lines, to reach almost to the first floor.

I suppose these are all national monuments now, but you could make quite a nice little holiday home out of this living: quarters on the ground floor, sleeping upstairs – fine for all but the depths of winter.

How I got here – well there lies a tale … it is what I think of my “mad dogs and Englishwomen” day of my holiday – usually have one, where I have mad plans that I make happen somehow or another.

So having read a guide to the region around Avignon I decided that I’d like to visit the plague wall, built in 1720. The guide suggested started out from Langes. So I got to the tourist office to ask about buses. Much head-scratching ensues. Only one bus a day goes to and from Langes, and the “to” has already gone. I finally get them to hand me the timetable; and work out for myself a route.

I’ll catch a bus to Pont Julien – a surviving Roman bridge that would be nice to see. Then I’ll catch the “one bus a day” bus back to Langes – then I’ll play it by ear… well on such days I have been known to hitch a ride when really desperate.

Of course, on the way to the bridge, it starts to rain – but once madness sets in, what can you do?

So the driver, looking doubtful, drops me beside the road, in the rain, that steady sort of settled in rain that you feel sure is going to last all day – as it does.

But I find the bridge, and it is amazing, battered, believable, not over-restored, and now part of what looks like an excellent cyclepath – the modern road traffic being carried on a concrete thing 100m or so upstream which looks to have been engineered to also protect the bridge.

This is a close-up of the stones – more than a bit battered and water-worn, but I guess if you were almost 2,000-years-old…

At this point, of course, I discovered that the camera memory card that was fine yesterday has stopped working today, so the pics are only from the cameraphone. It isn’t so good as my old one, then again I am also writing on this phone, with its keyboard et al, so you can’t have everything…

Then, already dripping slightly around the extremities (this wasn’t planned as a walking holiday, so I’m in woolen coat and umbrella), I head back to the road and think myself very clever when the bus turns up (there’s no stop, although the site is marked by this very old well). Why would you need to cover a well in this way? To reduce evaporation perhaps?

Same bus driver looks at me doubtfully when I ask for Lagnes, but has obviously decided I’m just a mad Englishwoman who has to be humoured. He again drops me in the middle of apparently nowhere, on a busy main road, telling me, briefly if helpfully, that Lagnes is off to the right.

So I walk, and I walk and I walk – and about 3km on, when I’m just about to give up, find Lagnes – up in the foothills – at least I think there are some bigger hills behind but can’t really tell since the cloud is so low it has almost enveloped the village.

The world hasn’t come to an end – I know that, because there are cheerful noises emerging from the quite large school – but otherwise it might be that the plague has returned. The town’s only restaurant is closed – it’s Monday, so of course. And the post office is closed, but then French post offices are always closed. But what’s really surprising is that the tabac is closed, and remains so between 12.30 when I arrive and about 3 when I finally leave. To call Lagnes sleepy would not be overstating the case.

I have some food, not lunch exactly, but it’ll do. So I explore of Lagnes – which doesn’t take long. It once had a fortress/chateau that now forms part of many of the houses on one side of town, and has some a lovely viewpoint from which I can see rain, cloud and more rain…

I head off in search of the plague wall. It is wet, slippery, and I’m going very cautiously. (I do have walking boots on – not utterly mad.)

But the rain is dripping off my backpack down my jeans, and the mud is working its way upwards … and I think, this must be something like travel back in those ancient times before Goretex, before decent maps, or any maps at all really, when you got wet, and kept going in the vague hope of reaching a destination. And finally, I do, this wonderful guard hut on the plague wall, about 2km out of town, over some pretty rough and not very well-delineated tracks. (Well the cloud didn’t help…)

Hugely atmospheric… in fact so atmospheric that I actually dreamed up an entire short story on the spot and have since written it down. Don’t know what I’ll do with it, but I haven’t written fiction in a long while, so the expedition thus far must have been special…

I usually never do this, but I was even driven to doing the “myself in front of site picture – the slightly bedraggled self, but that does prove I really did it. Behind me is the door from the upper story that opens on to the “safe” side of the wall; just behind my head is one of the windows of the upper story.

Now, however, I have to get back to civilization, or at least somewhere dry…

So that’s where I leave my muddy jeans: I walked in the direction of L’Isle Sur La Sorges, and at the other, main, entrance to the village (don’t know why the driver dropped me at the back side – probably for amusement) I just miss another bus, so walk the 8km into the town where there is wonder of wonders a train station. The nice thing about train stations is that a train usually turns up eventually, and the same can’t be said of buses.

Then the train, and back to Avignon to dry out, and dream of days and nights on the mur de la peste…