Chaos de Montpellier le Vieux, and Puncho d'Agast, near Millau

The campsite at Millau was my favourite - the pitches were huge, plenty of shade and birdlife, and as we were next to the Dourbie river, we had a lot of semi tame Mallards! Malcolm said he found a couple sleeping just outside his tent on the first morning! As we always had some old bread with us, I thought I'd see if they would eat from my hand. Only just! It was fun though, watching them. We started with two ducks and within ten minutes we had seven of them. 😀

On the second day at Millau we visited the Chaos de Montpellier le Vieux. I already shared a few photos from my ipad but here are a few more.

Info board (actually in decent English!) about the gorge behind me. This is the Gorge de la Dourbie river - it's one side of the Causse Noir where we were, and the vulture museum in the Gorge de la Jonte was the other side of the Causse Noir. The Causses are limestone plateaus, and there are five of them in this area. Some are a part of the Cevennes National Park. See the map below. Millau is at the tip of the Causse Noir, where the Tarn and Dourbie rivers meet.

Image credit: Paysage Aveyron

There were plenty of plants in flower and due to the altitude, were behind the flowering season of plants down nearer sea level. As well as many garrigue plants, I came across two orchids. I don't have a close up of this one, but it came back on PlantNet as 11% likely to be Fragrant Orchid (Gymnadenia conopsea). Now I wish I’d sniffed it!

This next one was easier to ID, it is Red Helleborine (Cephalanthera rubra).

Some of the faces in rocks: I think this next is the one they called 'Cyrano's Nose' (i.e. Cyrano de Bergerac, who had a long nose). I think it also looks like a Toby Jug, though I'm not sure about the chimney coming out of the back of the head. 😂

I don't know what this next one was called, if at all, but I see two faces, sideways on, with their chins jutting out. The one closest is wearing a mask (the trees). Or they could be skulls, the tree part being the eye socket. Depends which way I look at them. What do you see? 😀

Before heading back down to Millau we stopped at the far tip of the Causse Noir, a hill known as Puncho d'Agast, which is used for launching paragliders, and has a radio mast. We could see it from our campsite, as in the photo below.

This is the view from up the top. I'll save you the vertigo inducing photo of the man climbing up inside the radio mast this time though.

Looking over towards the Causse de Larzac to the south.

Again there were garrigue type plants here, despite the Causse Noir being mainly forested (hence I suppose it's name?). Many of the causses are very open and used for sheep farming, not that we saw much in the way of sheep.

This tree's seed pods fascinated us and I've found out that it is called Bladder Senna (Colutea arborescens) from the pea/bean family, Fabaceae.

As you can see from the photo of me up above, it wasn't very warm on this day, so I didn't see many butterflies until the following day, when the sun came out and the heat hit us - for the rest of our holiday. I can't complain too much when it means the butterflies come out to play, and I'm looking forward to getting to that bit on the blog!