My neighbour's poppies

Finding the unexpected

This is the final post from my recent trip to France. On our last full day, en route to our first site visit, we stopped for coffee in the square of a small town called St Savin. In the square (also a car park) were a number of trees that had been 'yarn bombed'.

Angles-sur-L'Anglin

This is a lovely village in its own right, which we had some time to explore alongside the scheduled visit to a museum and prehistoric art.

 

 

Poitiers Cathedral

At the end of the day we were making our way to our second hotel, just on the edge of Poitiers. We had time for a brief stop in Poitiers itself, to see the cathedral.

After some very traditional views, above, I was really drawn to the shapes and patterns made by this portion of the roof:

And I really loved the quirkiness of these figures, half painted, half-sculpted:

Either side of Calvin's pulpit

There was a very pleasant walk from where we left the bus to the rock shelter of Chaire a Calvin (see previous post). My eye was caught by these:

Following our visit to the rock shelter we went for lunch at a delightful organic, locavore, ecologically designed hotel-restaurant, situated in a beautiful old building, lovingly restored and converted (Les Orangeries - the link is to the automatically translated version of the page). The fireplace and the traditional smokers (for fish or meat) were very photogenic:

Calvin's pulpit

This rock is known as Calvin's Pulpit (La Chaire a Calvin) - Calvin reportedly preached from the top of it in 1520.

Underneath the rock outcrop is a rock shelter (known by the same name) with a carved frieze of animals, dating from the Magdalenian period (between 10 000 and 18 000 years ago).

The images that follow below aren't photos-for-the-sake-of-wanting-to-make-nice-photos; they're trying to give an impression of what we saw - the old, damaged and eroded remains of an ancient culture's images, carved into the rock by people surprisingly like ourselves.

A reconstruction of the frieze, to help you see what is there:

And the frieze itself:

The overlapping animal drawings on the right hand end:

The central horse:

The truncated animal at the left:

As we learnt, you have to get your eye in!

Cougnac first cave

Cougnac has two caves, the second of which is decorated. As is normal, no photography is allowed in that one, but in the first cave - 'decorated' only by nature - photographs are allowed. These are not technically 'good' photographs! The general light level is very low, with patches of bright illumination. The size of the cave means that flash is not always helpful. The route to walk through is defined and constrained, so the 'choice' of viewpoint is: take the photo or don't. And I console myself that the professional photographs on the postcards aren't that brilliant either.

But what is there to be seen is so extraordinary that it's worth the attempt to make images. This seems to me to be almost the archetype of a limestone cave. I described it to a friend as a fairy grotto designed by Hieronymus Bosch!

In the image below the red stripes on the 'flag' of rock are realistic (though slightly too pink in this image - the red is a rusty iron-ore colouring) and this feature is known as the streaky bacon - there are similar features in caves in Britain. The purple/blue colour below is not realistic and is a camera artefact of the generally low light and the deep shade under the overhang.

Below is a tiny horseshoe bat, roosting among the stalactites - in spite of the lights and constant throng of people passing through, there were several of these bats visible in the cave.

And here is a very grainy close-up:

Archaeological sites

I took a number of photos purely for my information, but I also tried to capture some interesting images-for-images' sake!

This last one is looking directly upwards showing how the two cliff faces arch towards each other:

Les Eyzies - museum terrace

The Prehistory Museum in Les Eyzies is built into the side of  a limestone cliff and overhang. The top floor leads out into a spectacular terrace that contains a huge statue of a Neanderthal man, clearly visible from the street below.