| Avi and I are spending a week and a half in Villeréal, a little village in South West France. This particular village is a bastide, which is a kind of settlement that dates from the middle ages. In those days, if a nobleman’s frontiers were lightly populated, he would sometimes try to strengthen them by creating new fortified towns. He would provide inducements for people to come and settle there. These new towns were constructed on a standard plan: they had a grid layout centered on a market square, a block set aside for the church, and were surrounded by a defensive wall. There are such towns in other parts of France as well, but this part of the Perigord, which was once a wooded wilderness, has a high concentration of them. Villeréal is very well-preserved example. Many of its houses (including the one we’re staying in) are half-timbered. The middle of the market square is occupied by a very impressive 15th century wooden structure that is still in good shape and in constant use. In the few days we have been here it has hosted an antique fair, a farmers’ market, and a weekly community gathering with all kinds of freshly-cooked food and traditional folk-dancing. The countryside around here is an attractive mix of hills and plains and woods and fields. They grow a lot of corn and sunflowers here, and there are also cattle, sheep, vineyards and fruit. We stopped at a farmstand today to buy some plums, and it emerged that the farmer spoke Occitan, which is the language that everyone around here used until French supplanted it not that long ago. Occitan and Catalan are close relatives, so when he spoke Occitan and I answered in Catalan we could understand each other pretty well, and that made my day. |
| Created on 12 September 2024, updated on 16 September 2024 by Samuel Ethan Fox |