A Rest on the Journey between London and Le Port

There is always a carved stone guarding the entrance to the territory of spirits. *1 Here too was a carved stone laid across the entrance to a woodland track, an effective guardian using its tons of weight to ward off vehicles powered by the infernal combustion engine. Just beyond the stone amongst the trees and bushes were dispersed on either side of the track about fifty large white and purple orchids, some so tall as to reach half way up a man's thigh *2. At first the track was wide with tractor tracks but these ended abruptly as if the machine that made them had been disassembled and removed from the spot. The track ran downhill just inside a wood of trees that had in the past been coppiced, the trees stretched uphill to the left whilst to the right a lush pasture could be seen through the edge of the wood lying in the flat valley bottom, beyond the meadow a gallery of trees indicated a river bank. The wood was spacious having no cover of shrubs or bushes, instead there lay a dense carpet of white Ramsons in full flower giving the cool air a slight odour of garlic. These flowers bounded the track and stretched away up the hillside, a field of unbroken white. The track narrowed to become a footpath although there were no turnings off nor were there any footprints of any kind, animal or human upon the earth. After a few hundred yards a yellow figwort (*3) could be seen growing amongst the Ramsons, making up about a quarter of the flower bed furnishing the wood.

The path ran on for a kilometer with no significant branches; the hillside closed in and the bed of flowers gave way to dense undergrowth growing from a steep bank. Eventually there appeared on the right a wooden building, apparently a barn, in front of which quietly grazed white steers. The windows of the buildings were large, square and empty of frame or glazing, more medieval than contemporary rural France. The path ended at a crossroads of dirt tracks, one leading to a gated cave on the left, about 150 yards from the "barn". Expecting a farmyard I saw instead that the dirt track onto which I had emerged passed right through the middle of long side of the barn, indeed it took up the entire width of the barn which had no front or end walls. Close inspection revealed a sturdy structure some 25ft in height with a well made pitched roof, floor boards of thick worn oak planks and clinker built walls with with the plain cut windows I had seen before. The whole structure was suspended upon enormous oak beams secured onto four stone buttresses situated at each corner of the structure above a small river the turbid waters of which flowed almost imperceptibly beneath. The track passed through the bridge and emerged to curl up around the opposite hillside out of sight.

A notice in old enamel nailed high up on north wall of the bridge told its story - how, in the middle of the nineteenth century - Italian workmen had been making the tunnel for the nearby railway line then being built between Paris and Toulouse. Their camp had been on the other side of the river from the tunnel where they worked and once when the river was in flood nine of the men had had their lives cut short whilst trying to cross over. The response of the Italians had been to build this massive bridge to cross safely to their camp, gave them shelter to have their lunch on stormy days, but most of all to construct a memorial. This is a memorial by illiterate men to their dead workmates - not a memorial of words but of massive materials and the exercise of great skills of construction - a singularity.

I returned along the path which had a "private path" notice at this end. Private to whom was never revealed, this path which ran through a flower garden for over a kilometer from nowhere to nowhere, just to other tracks, ways and bridges, where those who used it left no prints to show who or what it was that savoured the beauty of this wooded place.


*1 Two recent films Miazaki's Spirited Away and Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth have opening scenes where a child encounters stone carvings which mark the entering into a spirit world.

*2Probably Loose Flowered Orchid, Orchis laxiflora.

*3 Ramsons, Allium laxiflora.

*4 Probably Yellow Rattle Rhinanthus minor.