A View of the Pyrenees

It arrives like an invitation, unexpected and thrilling. I leave the house in the early morning and climb to the top of the field. I don’t look back, not until I reach the hedge line that divides our land from our good French neighbours. From the corner of my eye I can see our spaniel snuffling excitedly as she breathes in the traces, the spoor in the grass left by our nocturnal visitors, the wild boar, the deer, rabbits, foxes and hares. Only then do I turn and look south, to the horizon and the skyline, expecting to see a vagueness, a pale line of clouds or at best the smooth blue contours of the modest range of hills beyond ours. But sometimes, and we are talking no more than one day in thirty, after the rain has washed the atmosphere clean and the clouds have cleared quickly, or ice has seized the haze and condensed it to a prism, I can see the jagged, broken teeth of the ridge of the Pyrenees. Almost two hundred kilometres away, the curvature of the earth allows only the highest and finest peaks to be seen. Often snow-capped, the Pic du Midi represents the whole magnificent range of these mountains that stretch like the tail of a giant, petrified reptile from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, dividing France from Spain, corralling Iberia in its western corner and stopping France in its tracks. A range so wild, so dramatic that to walk there in the sharp air you can almost taste, to see the eagles making wide swirls in the thermals above, to smell the resin of the pines in the heat of the foothills, and to look from the peaks far into the plains below, is to feel tired yet almost immortal.

Of course this is a region with an exciting history, as so many frontiers have: ancient battles in the passes, lost smuggler’s trails, treacherous paths taken by the pursued from France to Spain and Spain to France, depending on the upheaval of the time. On the western side of the French Pyrenees, we have the country of the Basques, where the language has roots too deep to disinter, and the food and the culture is colourful and unique. This is where one of my protagonists, Jacques Lecoubarry started out. Deliberately, because at some stage I will be called back there to hew a story out of those timeless stones.

As Jacques would say.........

• 'A foreign land is full of Wolves.'

• 'Basque proverb?'

• 'Yes, or words to that effect.’

We almost bought a house there, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. For two wet weekends we travelled down to the region to look at property. The first weekend it rained constantly. The second weekend the rain and the wind were biblical. We chased an estate agent along the country roads from dripping house to dripping house, and the rain was washing away the road surface, and trees were crashing down across the road behind us. It was Indiana Jones goes house-hunting. When we returned to Lot and Garonne, the sun was shining. That is unfair on the Pyrenees region. On clear days the sky is egg-shell blue and the wind caresses the hot body with its cool balm from the mountains. But we decided to keep it at a distance. Like a friend that you love but you can’t spend too much time with, overwhelmed by their bounty and their extremes. But it is always there, and we forget about it until the morning that it calls again, and says, you know I am here, waiting. You know you must return and soon.

These mornings are uplifting and colour the whole day. That is what it is like to live here.