The mountains of Morvan

From the start, the high places of the Morvan held fear but also promise. Like the echoing Mountains of Mordor in Tolkein’s Middle Earth, few people know of them and fewer can locate them on a map. An empty region, floating somewhere off-centre in France. Granite uplands cast adrift in the chalk of Burgundy.

We’d dreamed of it as rolling hilltops of sparse green through which rasping stones would break. On the map, thin roads cut through the deep valleys unimpeded by towns or villages. Our route would stick to the high ground, encountering an occasional building – a hamlet, a farm or a sheepfold, or perhaps simply a deserted hovel. For all the research we did in advance, we found little accommodation. Our foreboding of long, steep days ending at basic mountain hostels was balanced out by the allure of this undiscovered region. So it became the region to base ourselves in for our cottage-based period.

Unplanned, zooming back to London for kit, we packed The Lord of the Rings cds and Howard Shore’s echoing music became the soundtrack to our Morvan. At first the forboding weighs heaviest, when the border of the Parc Natural Regional du Morvan almost exactly corresponds to the line where heavy rain clouds cluster and we live in a world of fog and shadows. But as the days clear and we trek south from Vézelay into the Morvan proper, I’m reminded of the Derbyshire Peaks for their granite and their height; and of Herefordshire for the small fields and orchards in blossom, and the thick hedges that knit it all together. Plunging ever southwards we encounter ravines backed by steep scars of cliffs; cascades and large lakes. The forests thicken and crowd out the pasture land and the views; and, as the mountain mass tilts upwards towards the south, we finally reach, after two weeks, the summits of 1530 feet at Mont Beuvray and 2730 feet (910 metres) at Haut Folin before gently descending through the sun-lush, white-cattled valleys of south Burgundy.

Though we thought of this area as empty and therefore backwards, long ago it was one of the most thriving in France. There are prehistoric echoes here, in the flints and paintings in the caves above Arcy-sur-Cure and Saint-Moré, of hunter-gatherers who found the plentiful running water, game and fruits a source of life. They cleared patches of trees and discovered agriculture. They heard about metal working and found the rocks here rich in different ores.

By the time the Romans invaded in the first century BC, the Morvan was the busy home of the Celtic Eduens people, traders, artisans, miners and farmers whose capital was at Mont Beuvray. The paths through the mountains were born there.

The Eduens already traded with the Romans, so when Julius Ceasar appeared they were ripe for adopting the Roman way of life – even if Mont Beuvray was, for a time, the rallying point for all Celtish tribes against the Romans. Slightly east, the Romans built Autun as an imperial new town to supplant Mont Beuvray and the temples, markets, circuses, craftsmen and money it offered worked. Further north on the same Agrippa Way leading from Milan all the way to Boulogne, we stood in the forest on a naturally-fortified promontory, awed by the size and efficiency of the Roman legion’s Camp de Cora whose remains rose above our heads.

But that was then. When the Romans left, the area slumped and the trees grew back. Not till the Middle Ages and feudalism was there the organisation – and the cheap serf labour – to make clearings and build castles, villages and churches. The paths through the forest revived and multiplied, the local to-ing and fro-ing buoyed up by trade, fairs and festivals, pilgrims and crusaders travelling through. Once more, the people of the Morvan adapted to these crowds of outsiders who brought new ideas and curious perspectives.

Even now the patterns of the Morvan recall those times. The chateaux on high outlooks, the hamlets or villages a little further off, the isolated farms where the lords granted rights of settlement and the use of wood and pasture to newcomers brought in to boost the local workforce, decimated by plague and war. The right to use the forest for building homes, heating them and to make tools and graze animals was enshrined: centuries later, an edict from the King in 1546 gave trees a commercial value so the landowners wanted to exploit them. Their attempts to retrench on those rights sparked a slow resentment that fuelled social unrest and made the south Morvan an independent-minded area ripe to support the Revolution.

Looking at the wooded peaks around us and the many tiny meadows with grazing cattle, it’s hard to credit that the Morvan was, for centuries, most famous as a wheat-and cereal-producing area. Nothing could be further from our memories of the vast plains of Picardy and the Marne which have today taken over that role. But the Morvan’s agricultural past was rich in the days before intensive farming – and may be rich again in a coming post-intensive farming era.

But grain was a seasonal income, and the Morvandieux once again showed their open vision in their willingness to travel for work. Many joined the logging and wood-floating industry that supplied all that wood to Paris. When coal became fashionable instead, they hitched oxen to carts and went off as carters or seasonal labourers out in the flat lands around. They were known as “Galvachers” and their departure each year on 1st May and return on 1st December gave rise to great fairs.

The most extraordinary example of open-minded generosity hospitality was the Morvan women. They became famous as wet nurses – leaving their own babies at home with grandparents to go and rear the rich children of Paris. Many a thatched roof was converted to slate or a smallholding bought on the strength of their milk, and fancy customs were brought back home to the Morvan too. Later, the travel was reversed. Orphans and abandoned children from Paris were sent here to be suckled and raised in exchange for a wage. Not only was the rural exodus experienced in the rest of France log delayed here by these extra incomes; but the new blood of the city children often remained, through intermarriages and work on farms or in trades. A continuation of the old blending and mixing of influences. Perhaps it is this attitude that has forged a special link between the Morvan and the Dutch, whose presence in cottages and cafés all around seems a source of contentment for the locals.

The Morvan is enchanting but changeable. Certainly it isn’t as fecund as Tolkien’s Shire, but the grass is plump and bright and the white Charolias calves are at peace under the snow of hawthorn blossom. Yet the forests can lose us easily and the valleys and hills will soon remove themselves from sight behind their veil of clouds and rain. In the Second World War, even the German occupiers were too intimidated by the forest to chase the resistance Maquis into its depths. Like the elfin Rivendell which sheltered the Fellowship of the Ring, the landscape and the Morvandais’ independence of mind made it the birthplace and headquarters of the French resistance, drawing fighters from all over France. The Morvan liberated itself in 1944, at a heavy cost to which the many monuments along the tracks and the harrowing eye-witness accounts in the Musée de la Resistance bear witness.

But the hospitality we find here floods deep-sprung from the older history of goings away and welcomings in. It is warm and matter-of-fact, a generosity served up in the heart of the homes. In the hilltop hamlet of St-André-en-Morvan the café-tabac is the front living room of a farmhouse where an old dog lies asleep in the mud. We sit at a plastic-clothed table in the gloom from the open door and the one tiny window. On the plain dresser are photos of grandchildren and a row of liqueur bottles that constitute the bar. The farmer’s wife, torn between us and her Suduko puzzle, comments on how many walkers came through twenty-five years ago when the GR was launched, but now she sees only one or two at the weekends. “But I’m here if they want me. I’m always here.” And indeed we did really, really want the ice-cold Orangina she set before us, however old its label.

Le Chalet Renard is uphill from a memorial to the Resistance and may have been one of the outlying farms that fed and sheltered the Maquisards. Now it is a walkers’ hostel with a newly-built extension. But here too hospitality is from the kitchen table where, even though a sign says “fermé” and the family is off to a wedding, the little boys rush inside to fill our water bottles for us.

In Saint-Brisson the young mother running the bar-brasserie on the square used the large, cool barroom as a play pen. I ate surrounded by the screeches of a soft ball game and the crumbs of a baby’s scrap of bread. A toothy baby in an ancient wooden high chair. In the Eco Musée up the road, the story of the Morvandieux’s past bleeds into the present and the future. In the present the open arms of the Morvan continue. This is not the kind of retrenched, enclosed society that shocks many English who think to set up home in rural France. Here the vet is Belgian, the jam-maker is Moroccan and the chambres d’hôte are run by a woman from Senegal. Local families retire into the enterprise of a guest house and campsite and are thrilled to meet the visitors from outside. But then, the Morvandieux themselves still often go away to work before coming back to take up the family living and a quality of life the cities can’t provide.

The Morvan is magical and full of stories and legends. It’s not quite the daunting place we had feared – but it is challenging and deserves respect. As we arrived here the hillsides exploded with wild flowers in yellows and purples. It makes sense that the natural handicaps of steep slopes, forests and robust winters, which prevented intensive farming ruining the environment here, are now being sung as natural head-starts in supply of organic, caring food.

At six in the evening we sit in the garden drinking white wine and reading, and I’m so hot I have my hat on and my feet are bare. At five past six we watch the arrival of a cold front from down the valley, a line of flat grey annihilating out the sun. As it passes, wild winds blow. At seven, we see little from behind the windows but tumultuous rain. By half past eight a red sunset also approaches from the valley and a clear glassy sky into which the birds fling their last songs of the day.







4th May 2008