Day 17 Revisited [Friday, 11 October 2024 - Cabrerets to Vers. ~10 klms, total ~334.3 klms., plus ~20klms by bus]. Update 19 October.
Most walking days were longer and harder than I had anticipated, and as a result I often didn’t get time to properly, thoughtfully, record the day’s activities. As well, sometimes just too much happened during the day to be able to capture it all accurately in the time available. The second last day of the walk, 11 October, the one I had labelled Penultimate Ultimate, was certainly one of those.
So here I am, a few days later, making an attempt to accurately recall and record the day properly.
The day started in Cabrerets, an unusual cliffside town on the Cele River (which joins the Lot a few kilometres downstream). I say cliffside because the Cele Valley is quite deep in places, and so over the centuries the villages which line the river sort of balance on the side of the cliffs above the river. In some cases this is literally so, as the houses, skinny things sometimes only a few metres wide but many metres high. These tend to be the older buildings; the newer ones tend to be a bit more ”normal”, but all the same the combination gives the town character. Following is a photo taken from the Pont de Cabrerets, a couple of hundred metres from our hotel (you almost can't see the house camouflaged against the surrounding cliff face - and for perspective that's a road at the bottom of the photo):
I had booked the aptly named Hotel Restaurant des Grottes du Pech Merle, which is perched right on the banks of the Cele.
Overlooking the Cele from the hotel outdoor area
The hotel was actually in renovation/shutdown mode at the end of the season, and so the restaurant was a misnomer, but the very well provisioned boulangerie just up the road (the only remaining eatery in town) came to the rescue.
Our first stop for the day, post petit déjeuner, was indeed to be the Grottes du Pech Merle, the Pech Merle Cave. The marche out of town is steep, but we got to the Cave well in advance of our 10:30 ticket time.
Above: leaving Cabrerets, the GR651 and the Cele Valley.
A slight (well, 15/20 minute) drama ensued as I was advised that our booking, which I had made a month earlier, had been arbitrarily cancelled. To this day, no-one, including the delightful staff at the Cave will ever be able to explain why and how. At one stage I had three staff members looking with concern at two computer screens, and at the same time on the phone to someone (their bank?) to ascertain that they had indeed received my Euros some weeks back, all the time creating a total logjam for all the other visitors (there must have been 15 or so behind me). Eventually they did confirm that I had paid, and that my booking was valid, and that due to the cancellation the 10:30 tour in English was now full. The Cave gods were smiling that day however, because they could fit us onto the 11:00 tour, also in English (phew! – I had momentary recollections of our fascinating wolf sanctuary tour some 12 months earlier in Puebla de Sanabria, totally in Spanish and therefore incomprehensible).
Anyway, initial dramas aside, the Cave tour was undoubtedly one of the highlights of the whole trip. No photos were allowed in the Cave (they were allowed in the museum which we wandered through pre-Cave), so apart from the few from the museum I will rely solely on their website for information. See here. In essence it goes like this: the Cave was discovered early last century having laid undisturbed and inaccessible due to a rock fall for some 12,000 years; some of the paintings have been carbon dated to at least 29,000 years old; there’s lots of evidence of both early human and cave bear activity in those preceding millennia. (And in the way of wonderful coincidences, and not knowing what was ahead of us, only a couple of days earlier Helen and I had been talking about Jean Auel’s marvellous book The Clan of the Cave Bear, loosely set somewhere in these parts and at around those times. To then actually experience a related set of stories was just delightful.)
Whilst we waited for our 11am tour we explored the museum. Some photos from there:
One of the things which stood out is the fairly obvious comparison between this prehistoric art and that which we have in Australia. Australia’s first nations people have a history going back some 60,000+ years, and depending on which sites one accesses, aboriginal rock art has been dated back some 30,000 years. See this article from the National Museum of Australia, which I will take as being a reputable source. That I recall I’ve seen rock art in WA, NT and western NSW, some of it pretty incredible. By comparison I’ve added below just one which I took in Kakadu National Park in September 2022, nothing to do with this current trip, obviously:
What I think struck me, and I’m happy to stand corrected on this, is that the Europeans seem better prepared and structured to market and promote their comparable sites than we do in Australia. There’s probably another deeper issue at play also, and once again I’m guessing: due to their long-standing histories and eevolutions the European communities have probably lost their ancestral and spiritual connections to their ancient lands, whereas for those in the “new world” (Australia, the US, Canada, at least) their relatively recent colonial histories mean that those connections still exist, and this may well create an altogether different dynamic. Anyway, I’m getting off topic.
Apart from simply wandering, the day’s next adventure was the crossing of the retired railway bridge over the Lot River at the delightfully named Pont Eiffel. I was unaware that M. Eiffel of Le Tour fame was firstly a railway engineer and designer of bridges. The crossing of the river via the bridge eliminated a couple of klms of walking, accompanied by a “steep scrambling” to get up onto the disused railway embankment. Both the guide book and Kerri Daniels' description of a couple of years earlier had painted a picture of a much more difficult and scary endeavour than it turned out to be. Some research seems to suggest that the railway was abandoned in the 1930s, although the bridge and its accompanying tracks seem to be in far better shape than something with almost 100 years of disuse, so I’m not sure about that timeframe. Some photos:
Crossing the field to get to the "scramble point"
Below: on the bridge
Along the way to the next phase in the day's adventure we bumped into a woolly mammoth. Amazing what you see:
Then came the walk along the tow-path or the Chemin de Halage. This website touches on some of the history, but the beauty of the path is quite outstanding, especially as we were accompanied by lovely blue skies to offset the colours of the autumn landscape. I took a squillion photos, and here's just a few to give a sense of the segment. See this link for a bit of a story about the tow path and the artwork in photo 2 below:
Which then led us onto the lovely little village of Saint-Circ-Lapopie. The village was apparently designated the most beautiful village in France in recent years – a huge call if ever there was one, and a debate into which I’m not going to enter. Suffice to say it is a pretty little place. I took the opportunity to explore and take photos, Janet and Helen did some shopping and then we all gathered for coffee/wine/ice-cream before finding our way through to the other end of town and catching a bus to Vers, as the walk along the towpath and into Saint-Circ-Lapopie had taken us in the opposite direction and no-one felt up to a further 20+ klm walk at around 5pm.
After a slightly confusing set of directions from the Saint-Circ-Lapopie tourist office the four of us made it to the bus-stop on the other side of town for an easy, welcome ride into Vers, and probably the best accommodation and certainly the best meal we had whole trip, at Hotel Restaurant La Truite Dorée.
As I said in my first post, this day was the highlight of the last 17. I stand by my other comment to those out there in Podiensis world, walk this day if nothing else.
Au revoir for now ...
Splendid, thank you.