Le moulin, Cucugnan

It's not a public holiday in France today, but we took the day off anyway, because it's Friday. The weather didn't look that promising, but we set off with our friend Ingrid to visit the château at Quéribus, where we haven't been for years. With S in charge of navigation we went on a tour of some of the wilder parts of the Corbières, looking beautiful under an increasingly blue sky, and stopped in Cucugnan for lunch. By this time it was positively summery, and we were able to eat outside, under an awning protecting us from the hot sun.

Cucugnan had fame conferred upon it by a well-known story, Le Curé de Cucugnan. The tale relates how the priest in the village, alarmed by the lack of faith among his parishioners, conjured up such dreadful visions of hell in a fire-breathing sermon that subsequent visitors to the village were struck by the universal piety of the inhabitants. The story was originally told in Occitan by Achille Mir, one of a group of 19th-century writers known as the Félibres, dedicated to keeping Provençal culture (or at least a sanitised version of it) alive. It was subsequently popularised by another member of the group, Alphonse Daudet, in his collection of tales of Provençal life Lettres de mon Moulin ("Letters from my Windmill"). This probably accounts for the fact that lots of people think Cucugnan is in Provence.

After lunch we walked up to the windmill. Since our last visit it has been completely renovated and is now used for grinding flour. There's a small shop attached where I bought some freshly ground flour for making bread with. The village is very charming and very much geared up for tourists, of whom there were few. Quéribus was not exactly heaving either, but there were a lot of Spanish visitors -- in fact practically everyone except us seemed to be speaking Spanish.

The château perches on its crag like a finger pointing stubbornly at the sky, witness to the fact that it was the last of the Cathar strongholds to fall, in 1255. It is still probably the best preserved of the border castles in this area, and the most inaccessible. The climb is longer and considerably steeper than at nearby Peyrepertuse, but you are rewarded by the view -- unfortunately it was rather hazy today, so we only got a faint glimpse of the Pyrenees.

We intended to take a shorter route back but were thwarted by a closed minor road between Tuchan and Maisons. It looked as if there had probably been a rock fall, so we were rather surprised that a Spanish driver ahead of us was pulling the barriers aside in order to drive through. This was particularly bold since he was driving a massive camper van. We took the sage decision of a U-turn and a detour via Durban, so I don't know how far he got.