Cordes sur Ciel, Tarn

We have been home for a few days now, full of unpacking a motorhome and doing tons of laundry, not just ours but the bedding and towels from our friends who came to housesit for us. It always takes an age to get through it all, and there are three of us this time!

I've managed to whittle down about 90 photos of Cordes to just a few, but we weren't anywhere where we could get a photo like this, as I think we came into the village via the 'wrong' way. So I've borrowed this image from the Tarn Tourist Guide.



I'm so pleased I chose to visit this delightful village, as previously we had seen it from a distance, rising out of the countryside up towards the sky; it really stuck in my mind and I had always wanted to come here.

As you can imagine, there is a lot of walking involved, although there is a little tourist train that you can take, if you happen to be in the right place at the right time. We walked!

I loved this house! Butterflies and insect hotels galore, and even a stone cat.

Cordes sur Ciel was built back in the 13th century as a bastide (new) town, originally conceived to resettle and shelter people who had been displaced by the Albigensian Crusade. Reading about this subject, I had always though bastide towns were defensive towns, but apparently not, though many were built in defensive positions such as on top of hills.

The covered market on the right was built in the 13th century as well, now it has many restaurant tables there making the most of the shade on the hot summer days.

Saint-Michel Church, also mostly dating from the 13thC.

There are a number of well preserved gothic mansions, such as the Maison de Grand Veneur below.

And lovely little artisanal shops dotted about here and there.

One of the gates to the oldest part of the town on top of the hill.

This poor house, it had been patched up with all sorts of building materials over the decades/centuries. It could be beautiful.....

There were a number of houses like this with bricks between the timbers, some very attractively done.

Another gate into the older part of town.

On our way down we visited the Jardin de Paradis, a lovely terraced garden with many places to sit and relax. The water garden had a number of frogs sitting on the lily pads and there was even a level dedicated to veggie growing.

All that on just day one of our holiday! I loved our all-too-short holiday, apart from the heat at times! Many of the places we travelled through I would like to go back to to see more. Maybe next year.... 😀

Some more holiday photos

Here we are on our last full day and it will be a while before I get to blogging properly, so I’m uploading a few more pics from my iPad. My, how the temps have changed - seeing myself in a jacket is funny now, as we have sweltered since the day after these photos were taken!

These next few pictures were whilst we were staying at Millau, and we visited the Chaos de Montpellier-le-Vieux, an area of amazing rock formations. There was a little train doing some of the route so we were able to walk one way then get the train back.  Many of the rocks had names after what the person who named them thought they resembled - certainly it was easy to see faces in the rocks!

We then drove up to a viewpoint overlooking Millau and the relatively new Viaduct de Millau (motorway bridge), unfortunately not very clear on this hazy day here. 

There was a man climbing up inside this transmission tower - enough to give you vertigo! 

The next day we drove south to the Cirque de Navacelles - a gorge with a horseshoe meander where the river had cut a short cut through over thousands of years to leave a hill with some flat land around, now agricultural land on presumably lovely loam soil. This was the start of the warm weather, and the start of several days of amazing amounts of butterflies! 💕 We stopped at various viewpoints on both sides of the gorge, and drove down into it to get to the other side, but didn’t try to get right down to the village in a motorhome. There was nowhere to stop on this road - such a shame as there were clouds of butterflies! We knew many were Black Satyrs, which I had never seen before but K had discovered last year on one of his long walks. Luckily he spotted a single one at the top so I was able to see it properly. I will keep all the butterfly images for a real blog post later on. 

From the other side - in some views you can clearly see the road we took.

After the Cirque we drove north to the highest point in the Aveyron dept, Mt Aigoual, then the next day to the highest point in the neighbouring Lozere dept, called Mt Lozere. We then headed into the Ardeche, drove the gorges there (after having a lovely lunch out with an old school friend who I last saw when she came to our house in Brittany maybe 15 years ago), then the Pont du Gard, a bit of the Camargue, and now staying in the Petit Camargue near Le Grau du Roi and Aigues Mortes, which is impressive. I don’t have time to load more photos so I’ll leave it for now and try to do a proper post soon! 

First few days of holiday

Thanks to those of you who commented on my last post - I’m glad to hear the images look ok. It’s time I posted some photos as we are already nearly halfway through our 12 days and I’ve taken loads of pictures!

The weather hasn’t been that great so far, but it’s due to be (too) hot for most of the rest of the trip - but at least sun and warmth will bring the butterflies out to play. 😄

Our first stop was Cordes sur Ciel, one of France’s ‘Most Beautiful Villages’. It’s perched high up on a hill in the Tarn department with fantastic views all around.

Monday we went to Albi, the capital of the Tarn department and built on the banks of the Tarn river. It has an enormous and very unusual brick cathedral, austere on the outside yet incredibly ornate inside. I’ll post more of this cathedral after our return as it’s quite amazing!

Looking up at the ceiling:

On our way to Millau for the night, we stopped at a strange place called the “Rougier de Camares”, where there is a whole valley with weird outcrops of red rock, which has unusual vegetation due to the iron in the rock, and the clay strata mixed in with it.

Yesterday was grey and cool but we visited a vulture museum in a scenic gorge, the Gorge de la Jonte. They had an observation deck full of spotting scopes and people who work there helping with finding the nests - thanks to them we saw a Black Vulture in a nest on a tree top, with a little youngster’s head bobbing up and down - still very distant, even with the scope, but a fantastic experience. There is only one nesting couple of black Vultures here, but over 200 nesting Griffon Vultures, needless to say we saw loads of Griffons! We were very impressed with the museum which was very informative, modern and interactive.

I will wait until I’m home to post K’s vulture photos, but this is the kind of scenery :

Yesterday’s photos will wait till the next post. As before, these are all SOOC, but they are mostly taken with our newish Canon 90D, which K tried but found too sensitive with his long lenses for bird photography (it has 35Mpixels) so he’s gone for a Canon mirrorless one which he is happy with now. So it’s mine! I’m using a 18-135 lens and am still learning how to use the camera - don’t know what half the buttons are yet. 😁

Another orchid at home (and a test post)

I didn’t have time to blog before going away in the Moho, so I’m going to see if I can post a photo from my iPad direct to my blog.

Well this seems to be working! That means I can post a few photos here and there from our visits, then I’ll do a few more detailed posts when we return. How I’ll pick out just a few photos I don’t know though!

This, by the way, is a Tongue Orchid (Serapias lingua), and it’s yet another species of orchid discovered at home, this time on the grass verge beside the road! K likes to mow out there to keep it tidy and you can see where it has been mown off where the red coloured stem meets the older green stem. However, because it was dry in May the grass didn’t grow so much, which gave the orchids a chance to flower. In future, we will look out for this orchid and mark where it is growing like with the ones in the lawns! There were quite a few more Pyramid Orchids flowering on the verge and grass bank too.

This is where the orchids are growing, along with many other wild plants.The pink blobs are the Pyramid orchids, and there must be more than 50 of them growing in our garden and the verge/bank!

Here, though, you can see the benefit mowing has on the orchids, as the thick long grass on the other side doesn’t give any orchids a chance to grow. So, sometimes, mowing isn’t nature’s enemy! 😄

These photos are all SOOC, that means Straight Out Of Camera, with no editing. I can’t be bothered when I’m on holiday, and I can’t do my watermark either as I do that in Lightroom on my desktop computer. It will be interesting to see what these images look like when posted as I have no control over photo size when I post anything from my iPad. 

We are currently between Cordes sur Ciel and Albi, both of which we have or will visit. I’ll be back with a few more photos soon, but please bear in mind that I can’t reply to comments using my iPad, but I’ll try to borrow K’s laptop occasionally if necessary.