Arles, Carcassonne and Le Eyzies – by Gary

Arles

Arles is an old Roman city, and it has lots of Roman sites including an amazingly intact amphitheatre, and ruins of a theatre, temple, bridge and aqueducts.  However for a while in 1888-9 it was also the home of Vincent Van Gogh and he used several of the town’s sites as inspiration for his work.  We visited the city specifically to do a self-guided walk of several of the places where Vincent put up his easel.

Le Jardin de la Maison de Sante: in Vincent’s day this was apparently a psychiatric hospital, and is where Vincent admitted himself after fighting with his friend Paul Gauguin, cutting off an ear in the process.  Vincent suffered terribly from depression.

Le Cafe “Le Soir” (Cafe Terrace at Night).

L’escalier du Pont de Trinquetaille (The Trinqueataille Bridge).  Vincent’s physchiatrist considered that Vincent’s painting was good therapy, a good outlet.  It is said he only sold one painting during his entire painting career.

La Nuit etoilee (Starry Night over the Rhone).

La Maison jaune (The Yellow House):  This painting is of Vincent’s Arles home (he shared it with Paul Gauguin for a while), but his yellow house was destroyed by a world war bomb.  You can see the building behind in his painting is still intact.

Les Arènes (Spectators in the Arena at Arles):  You can’t see the actual location for this work, because it is only open during bull-fights...

... this is the bullfight location, the ancient Roman amphitheatre – these events are held here to this day – this part of France being heavily influenced by Spanish culture.

Le Jardin public (The Public Gardens).  Vincent committed suicide only a couple of years after leaving Arles.

After his death Vincent was finally recognized as one of the truly great artists of his day.  You can’t help but wonder if recognition had come during his life whether it would have given him the sense of self worth and purpose to cope with his depression.

We really enjoyed this little excursion in to the world of post-impressionism (a word we learnt at Musee D’Orsay, although we haven’t really a clue what it means).

Carcassonne
This World Heritage site is a somewhat controversial mediaeval walled city; controversial because, while it authentically presents typical defense systems from the era, by the 19th century it was in bad shape, and had to be extensively restored, and some consider it unlikely to be a particularly faithful restoration.  Thankfully, it did little to detract from our enjoyment.

From a distance the town walls have a fairy-tale character...

.. and as you get closer it only gets better (its restoration was not particularly recent, it commenced in 1853).

The town is protected behind two walls with elaborate defenses on each...

archer slits, murder holes, drawbridges, portcullis etc.

and of course moats (well once anyway).

Within the town walls there is a keep, also heavily defended behind two more walls and another moat – the timber ‘hoarding’ shown here was rapidly deployed if an attack was imminent, placed in prepared slots in the stone-work.  It provided a superior defensive platform for archers, stone throwers, boiling oil tippers and so on.

The town also features some very cool shopping.  This is a lolly shop – 

it certainly drew in Zeke and Nina to part with some pocket money.

Les Eyzies de-Tayac
The hilly area around this town is underlain by soft limestone which is often exposed at the surface as cliffs, cliffs that are honey-combed with natural caves.  Because the rock is soft, villagers often cut back in to cliff edges, almost certainly(at least to begin with) taking advantage of pre-existing caves, to place their houses partially within native rock.

You can see at least one of the houses above is more ‘in’ the cliff than out.  

We learnt the locals have been utilizing these limestone caves for a seriously, seriously long time.   Here is the story

About 10,000 to 15,000 years ago the local fauna was quite different.  For a start there was a lot more of it, and there were some surprising species, including lots of wild horses.

And there were ibex ...

... herds of bison...

... amazing wooly rhinoceros ...

... and perhaps most surprising of all, wooly mammoths.

In the early twentieth century, following up on reports from locals, academics from Paris came to investigate some of the caves.

And we got to follow in their footsteps.  They only allowed six visitors at a time into this cave, accompanied by a trained guide (she was excellent).  Strictly no photos, no touching the cave walls, it’s a World Heritage site, fragile and carefully protected.

And deep within the cave there they all were, preserved as beautiful works of art etched in to the soft rock by human artists at least 12,000 years ago.

The artists must have spent ages studying the contours of the caves interior, because their work utilizes the lumps, bumps and fissures to give their work a strong 3D aspect that you really can’t see in these tracings.

The depiction of horses was the most common, but also deer and bison herds.  We did get to see mammoths and one rhino. The depiction of human figures in this era was apparently very rare – but we also got to see one.

We all got extremely cold while in the cave, we just didn't have appropriate clothing, and came out shaking to defrost in the car with the heater on full. Despite the cold this was one of Nina’s favourite European sites.  It really was intriguing to imagine early man crawling deep within this cave with primitive torch lights, to spend hundreds of hours creating these amazing drawings.  Why? What was the impetus?

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