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By Jeremy Francis
"...nowhere else but the Mediterranean has nature moulded people so much and people have in turn influenced nature. Human pressures on Mediterranean ecosystems have existed for so long that human activity should be considered as an integral ecological feature of the Mediterranean."
From the Mediterranean basin: Biological Diversity in Space and Time.
Jacques Blondel and others.
Above: Sigale and its famous clock tower. My sisters’ is the nearest house, on the right and painted creamy-white.
August 2012 – Last month Valerie and I visited my sister Jenny in the French farmhouse she restored back in the 1990s, in the mountains north of Nice. This ambitious retirement project on the part of my sister and late brother-in-law, Philip Clairs, is in the lovely village of Sigale. Sigale is one of the high villages of the Alps Maritime, the mountains of the Cote D’Azure. Some two hundred people live in the village today. There were more than twelve hundred in the 1600s and 1800s and even now numbers swell to one thousand and more, on summery holiday weekends, local families returning from their weekday lives on the coast. This was the second time I had visited. My first was in June 2007 and like most first-timers I was fairly bowled over.
Above: Sigale’s main street. In fact the only street you can drive on. It was made in the late-1800s and covers several alley ways which nowadays run underneath, and all hundreds of years older than the road.
Above: The view from near my sister, Jenny’s front door. The righthand alleyway leads to the village square, the lefthand one to the far end of Sigale, and the greenery at centre conceals the door to Renei’s garden.
Sigale translates as ‘cicada’. One sees ceramic and carved-wood cicadas honouring these rackety insects everywhere in the village. Sigale lies hard on the border of the long-vanished Duchy of Savoy. Ruins of a border outpost are just minutes’ walk down the slope. Savoy as an independent state vanished in the 19th Century, however, once upon a time its territory stretched to some sandy Mediterranean beaches, then cut across the limestone maelstrom of the Alpes Maritime to the Po River Valley and the lush farmland around Turin, and from there stretched over the ice rivers and snow mountains of the High Alps to Geneva and the grey misty woodlands of Burgundy. The Roquesteron Valley only became part of France in 1861 and going by all the Italian family names in the cemetery it could just as well be in Italy.
Above: Jenny Clairs’ front door, leading to the kitchen, and to the right another hallway to the spiral steps. Notice hexagonal tiles.
The mountains around the village are impressive and the road in makes for a memorable drive. It’s chiselled into cliff-faces here and there and hangs over chasms just a little too often. Not enough to slow down the locals mind and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many vehicles with crumpled body-work as on the steep windy road linking Gillette, Roquesteron, Sigale and Le Penne. And certainly never so many limestone cliffs streaked with duco. There’s not a car that hasn’t left some of its paintwork on the mountainside I was thinking, driving in that first time. My sister has known Australian friends to knock on her door in a state of white-knuckled wordless disbelief.
Sigale sits high near the head of one of the many abrupt valleys gouged into the improbable mountains along the French Riviere. Everywhere one sees layers of sedimentary rock formed on an ocean floor eons ago and hoisted thousands of metres high and buckled and distorted in every way imaginable. Springs burst from ravines and icy water sluices down valleys cluttered with smashed limestone all along this coast. Italy, really the battering-ram tip of Africa, has been inching its way north for millions of years against the European tectonic plate and rumpling up an intervening sea floor into the Alps. The rich alluvial plains of the Po River valley are almost encircled by the fierce mountain ramparts thrown up by the shuddering never ending impact.
Above: The locals playing boule. Notice the square balls (actually they’re wooden blocks) much better on steepish slopes with steps everywhere than round balls though they do bounce awkwardly..
Above: The daily patisserie van with Valerie and Jenny in the queue. The baguettes were to die for.
Sigale clings so limpet-like to its ridge that one street lies under a mass of bulging limestone squeezed sideways from the mountain. All the houses on one side are mortared to the living rock. While I was visiting, local authorities, rock climbers and helicopters, were busily stretching steel netting across the cliff to stop boulders falling through roofs. These didn’t need to bounce to be a problem. A lump of limestone could surreptitiously detach itself and fall vertically and still come to rest in someone’s living room.
The topography of the Esteron Valley is spectacular. Access has always been difficult and the villages supplied by mule-trains until recent times. Not far from Sigale there’s a medieval stone bridge connecting one mountain with another over one vertiginous ravine built exactly to a mule’s width. Constructing today’s road in was an engineering feat. It required several tunnels through the limestone. My first visit, not far from Sigale, Jenny parked her Renault for me to take photos. I jumped out, knelt on the parapet wall and she shouted in alarm. Then explained my vantage spot was where a photographer, the previous summer, had knocked his camera from the wall, watched it lodge just inches out of reach, stepped over to retrieve it and lost his footing and fallen off the mountainside. The men of Sigale were all that afternoon retrieving his body.
Despite their ruggedness all but the steepest slopes around the village are cultivated. Every scrap of half-decent soil was terraced thousands of years ago. Walls were constructed buttressing the mountain all the way from the river to Sigale high on its cliff. Most terraces are narrow and awkward to get to and the effort that went into their making is at first baffling allowing what must have been meagre returns.
The villages of the Roquesteron Valley are ancient and those first days I was often wondering how old they might be. I thought of armies pushing their way over these mountains. Men on the march between what so only recently have become Italy and France. Over the ridge behind Sigale there’s the Valley of the Var, the river flowing quietly to the sea among the villas of Nice. Inland its banks are lined with little farms and market gardens. For hungry armies this was probably an enticing thoroughfare, I was thinking. Unlike the Roquesteron Valley which is narrow and treacherous, with its floor clogged with forest and limestone rubble. Then there the river raging to the sea. Villages here cling to cliffs and in the old days they were fortified. Army quartermasters would have found the Roquesteron Valley distinctly uninviting and its villages likely a haven for people ducking out of harm’s way. I’m sure Sigale was ignored by Carthaginians moving against Rome, Romans marching on Gaul. Slopes here would have been formidable for the barbarian hordes of the interminable Middle Ages, dragging belongings around behind them in cumbersome wooden carts. French troops storming Italy in Renaissance times would not have dreamed of coming this way, nor Napoleon leading his Grande Armee two hundred years later. So for a long time more people lived along the Roquesteron than one might at first think.
Above: The village of Roquesteron (two villages down from Sigale) the river running gently after several weeks of no rain.
Even today villagers are proprietorial of their gardens. Everyone has a few. Most seem weedy and abandoned though that doesn’t mean someone’s not keeping an eye on them. Walking with Jenny past one of Sigale’s ancient gateways, I noticed a plum pendulous with purple fruit. “Shall we try one?” I asked and she was aghast. “That’s someone’s tree. We will have been seen coming down here and if fruit go missing the owner will soon know.” We strolled away both wondering about those plums.
Above: The arch through the village wall.
Ownership arrangements for these terraces are complicated. Jenny has two on one side of her house, good for some roses and a patch of grass. On the other side there’s another, neatly paved with a table shaded by a grapevine. To walk below Jenny’s house between her rose garden and her breakfast arbour is to trespass. Land on the down-hill side, right to the house wall, belongs to someone else, and the owner has made it plain several times now he’s not one for the forgiving of trespassers. So this means walking the long way round. Up two flights of steps and along a public footpath, across a stone pedestrian fly-over affair (built hundreds of years ago at a very surprising height between Jenny’s house and her neighbour’s) and down more steps.
Above: Sigale’s fountain and laundry. In the old days (before washing machines) after everyone had finished their laundry, the trough of water would be released to roar off down the alleyway right past Jenny’s front door. If you were in the way, you had to run.
Maps showing which family owns which terrace generally go back to Napoleonic times. Some are older though and occasionally hundreds of years older. When people own some land here, and more over there, some terraces by the river and a few over the back ridge, there’ll always be arguments. Quarrels are settled by pulling out the oldest maps and totting up genealogies.
There are good reasons for Sigale’s labyrinthine land-tenure arrangements when one thinks. No-matter the matrimonial re-adjustments of the generations these ensure one family never accumulates all the land close to the village. The climb hundreds of feet up from the river is quite an effort and carting a harvest on one’s back over a high ridgeline is serious work. One family owning all the land nearest the village would be most unfair, so gardens are scattered far and wide, sharing things around.
Above: A few of Sigale’s many terraces. All thousands of years old, and now rapidly going back to nature. The most recent animal to reappear after not being seen since medieval times are wolves. Wolves have walked back to France from Eastern Europe and nowadays people hear them howling in the village itself. Slightly unnerving!
Jenny’s house had not been lived in for 40 years and was about to fall down when she and my brother-in-law took possession in 1990. Several summers of holiday work were required to make it congenial for overnight stays. Jenny and Philip encountered all the conundrums one associates with these endeavours. The roof needed work, tiles were broken, timbers rotten. The village handyman offered to make things weather-tight with brand-new roof tiles at what seemed a very encouraging price, and it was years attuning to the patois peculiar to the valley before it dawned the trailer-loads of ancient tiles this gentleman so carefully removed and sold on paid for the new ones several times over.
Above: My sister’s kitchen. The stove is original.
Above: The spiral steps.
Above: Jenny’s belvedere. Originally for drying fruit.
Twenty years on and my sister’s house is now very splendid. Even locals say it’s the best house in the village now. And the shiny roof not too noticeable. One walks from the church past the Marie (the mayoral residence beside the village square) down zigzag alleyways (steps everywhere, no good for cars) to my sister’s place at the very edge of the village (part of its defences once, the walls on the down-hill side 20 feet thick). Swinging open a heavy oak door there are traditional hexagonal terracotta floor tiles in the hallway, then several flights of a rather sharp climb up some astonishing masonry-work spiral steps (all houses are four stories high in Sigale, and some five) to a curious belvedere arrangement under the roof (one end is open to the elements). In the old days this was for drying fruit (things like plums).
From Jenny’s belvedere there are views over the village to a clock tower high on a pinnacle of limestone. Its face is hard to make out but, no-matter, the bell tolls the hours and everyone hears. The clock strikes twice on the hour, three minutes apart. A traditional arrangement and often useful. Woken my first morning from jet-lagged slumbers by dolorous clangs I was wondering “was that seven, or eight, or nine?” Three minutes later and counting, sure enough, six o’clock! Most of the mountain is within earshot of Sigale’s bell. It’s tolled the hours and weeks and seasons for generations, called workers to meals and signalled day’s end for hundreds of years.
Above: Sigale’s clock tower.
Above: View from the tower to the square, the street underneath the cliff to the rear and left.
Above: A typical arrangement of roofs. Notice arbour centre-rear made up of a grid of umbrellas – though perhaps it’s really an art work.
Above: My sister’s corner of Sigale, Jenny standing in her belvedere.
There’s a lovely sunny terrace across the alley from Jenny’s house. Renei once owned a nursery on the coast and, returning to the village, as a retirement project for years now he’s been busily restoring the old family home and setting out a garden. Renei’s terrace seemed all hollyhocks from my sister’s belvedere in 2007. Invited to explore, we found it really a potager. Among the hollyhocks was every edible imaginable. Then we were shown Renei’s holy of holies, his cellar. In the half-ruined building at the end of the garden (a bricked up Romanesque arch hinted this once might have been part of a monastery) hundreds of wines were laid down. Made from every fruit and vegetable Renei could lay his hands on, except grapes I at length noticed.
Above: A detail of Renei’s garden Cycad revoluta and Yucca rostrata.
Above: Renei Sensi and his wife Fiore, and Jenny Clairs.
That first evening, after our meal, in the shadows under the oak beside my sister’s rose garden, there were fireflies. I’d never seen fireflies before and wandered entranced for hours. Everywhere their fragmentary pale green dots were winking on and off, hundreds of them. The valley had been rumbling with thunder most of the previous week, that evening was still though, the air liquid with perfume. It was the last days of June and around the town square by Sigale’s old church (its walls tremendously thick, no windows, really a fort) ancient lindens were pendulous with spicily-scented blossoms. Approaching mid-night, not at all sleepy and exploring a path away from the village, finding more and more fireflies (locally they’re ‘lucioles’) I was brought to a stand-still by sudden loud snuffling. Moments later, like Robin Goodfellow stepping out from the wings, all sweetness and smiles, an enormous wild boar (a ‘sanglier’) trotted into the light of a streetlamp along the path. Then there were a mob of them. I stood stock-still. Wild boar were all around me now rootling and snuffling and as far as I could make out all of them unconcerned. Twelve, perhaps fifteen, trotted past and under the streetlamp and off into the shadows.
* * *
The English collective noun for wild boar is a ‘sounder’. A corruption of ‘sanglier’ from the olden times I suppose. Anyway I’ll stay with ‘mob’. And thinking back to that evening, I should say I’m someone who has worked with pigs. As a kid on the farm it was my job to bucket-feed pigs and I too-well remember running for dear life itself on several nasty occasions from enraged old sows after my upsetting them for god knows what obscure reason. It’s amazing how high a barbed-wire fence one can sail over with ease when there’s a huge old sow galloping and chomping and frothing furiously hard on one’s heels.
* * *
The quote heading the ‘Fireflies’ essay is from Louisa Jones, from Mediterranean Landscape Design, Vernacular Contemporary.
Jones also points out...
" The great surprise is that this humanisation of the natural landscape has been, on the whole, generative of life rather than destructive...".
quoting Blondel again.
"There is often more biodiversity in a single square kilometre in the Mediterranean than in any area 100 times larger in the northern parts of Europe.’ Neither the climate zone, between temperate and tropical, nor the complex geological history of the region suffices to explain this. At a time we are encouraged to tread lightly’ on the earth, we learn with some amazement that these millennia of human meddling, in spite of disasters past and present, have not been all bad.".
Again quoting Jacques Blondel from Louisa Jones (the introduction)
" ...although there is no doubt that large-scale destruction has taken place and that much of the shrublands in the Mediterranean are modified or derived – not to say degraded – forms of former forests and woodlands, it is indisputable that the exceptional diversity and dynamic structure of the Mediterranean ecosystems and communities result in part from human influence".
Above: View from the belvedere across the valley.
The forests of the Alps Maritime are instructive. The dominant tree is an oak growing some ten metres high and often the understorey consists of smoke-bush, Cotinus coggygria. Now lovely coloured-leaf forms of this useful plant are offered in Australian nurseries, however, in the dappled light of the oaks of the French Riviera it is always tediously bland-green. Competing to the same height, one finds English box. Now why on earth do we call this plant ‘English’? Growing wild in that country, Buxus sempervirens is vanishingly rare. Box only made it to England at the tail end of the last ice age and the Channel flooding with melt-water 9,000 years ago. A bare handful of box plants grow in the wild, dotted along the rolling South Downs within ear-shot of Channel beaches. In the oak forests of the Cote d’Azure though English box is as common as muck. Preparing for their annual fete, the villagers of Sigale cut great lengths of box in order to thatch an immense frame erected above one of the village squares. Now using box as thatching material may seem eccentric, however, in the forests of the Alps Maritime six metre lengths of Buxus sempervirens can easily be found and make useful thatching material.
Footnote – Not now (August 2024) however, as box has entirely vanished from these forests due to the arrival of ‘box beetle’ and all that is left is the Smoke bush. (JF)
During the summer of 2011, not far from Sigale there was a fire. Now summers are dry in these mountains and fires not uncommon. The topography makes conventional fire-fighting out of the question and any fire has to be doused from the air. In this case the flames were controlled, though with difficulty and taking days. My sister drove around the following week to see. Pines among the oaks added heat to the flames but the understorey box had been the villain. Buxus sempervirons is more flammable than one might imagine. Once alight, it is not easy to extinguish. We should not be planting box near our homes. A box hedge up to the front door makes an enticing invitation to passing fires. Jenny could see that the oaks had prevented the flames from moving any great distance. The fire had been merely inching about burning understorey, however, the box had been releasing much heat and the fire difficult to extinguish. Indeed for most of the week aircraft by the squadron had been dropping great tonnages of water before it was finally quelled. Still, the oaks prevented the flames from travelling, and my sister, accustomed to fires in Australia, was amused to find less than 40 hectares of blackened mountainside.
Above: Sigale at twilight. Renei’s amazing garden centre, alleyway to the square to the right, alleyway to the far end of village to the left, and the clock tower dead centre.
Above: The morning we left, the mountains rising from the mist.