Heritage

It's the Journee de Patrimoine - heritage day - today and as usual the church tower was opened for those not of faint heart or leg to climb to the room above the bells, the last twenty feet or so by very steep ladder. The windows are narrow and you can't get a panoramic view - not since they closed off the narrow balcony on which youngsters used to scare each other, a hundred feet up.

It's still good fun, and not as easy as you might think, to try to spot houses of people you know when the view is so different from everyday. One surprise is the number of roof terraces (not strictly legal), and another the number of TV satellite dishes, which all stare blankly in the same direction. I chose this shot to show the roof textures and the narrow streets.

There was a slide show on three interesting periods of the village history: the Roman era from 0 to 200 AD or so, when our fresh water spring was connected by an aqueduct to the town of Beziers some 20km away; the 13th century when the bishops of Beziers built a fine summer palace here and collected taxes and went hunting; and 1925-1950 when there was the only mainland oil field in France here. But what attracted most interest was a display outdoors of school photos from around 1930 to 1970 - everybody wanted to find themselves and their childhood friends.

I was invited to join the Foyer Rural meal afterwards out in the square in front of the church, and we sat in the sun for homemade lasagne and more desserts than anyone could manage.