Corky

A dull day in the South of France found us driving around St Raphael looking for the Leclerc.

As the houses grew more and more occasional we realised that in fact we were in the Esterel Massif, with the clouds touching the mountaintops and everything scrubby and stunted.

Scrub up.

It took quite a while to realise that lots of the little trees were actually a type of oak.

It took even longer to see that they had all been bark-stripped up to head level.

We did not see any of the modern plastic cork oaks, nor any screw-top acorns, but these ancient cork-oaks are still being harvested, and I'm very pleased.