June 30 Wednesday Market, Thiviers, St Jean d Cole

To market, to market to buy a fat pig, duck or chook, replacement suspenders for your corset, wafer thin walnut macaroons, a scalloped edged mirror, any of an infinite variety of salamis, sausages and meat products, or cheeses, fruit and veg, or even a pendulum clock! You name it, I think you’re likely to find it at the bustling Piegut (pr. Peejoo)/Pluviers Wednesday morning market.
My suspenders have been holding up just fine so our shopping was more a taste opportunity for a variety of luscious dried and fresh fruits, veg and cheeses, with Diana scoring a real bargain with two pair of lovely sandals to replace her broken pair. I had some very interesting conversations with stall owners about cheeses and of course had the taste benefits expounded of making cheese from unpasteurized milk. Both the English and French samples I bought were of course unpasteursed as opposed to our NZ method.
Even a short 20 minute drive such as we took to Piegut is fascinating here. Travel (thanks to GPS Gretel) is on a variety of very narrow roads, often with absolutely no road markings and sometimes in very poor repair, through farmland with grazing and crops punctuated by oak forests and today pine and Douglas Fir plantations. There seems to be no sign of life in the countryside but tiny villages with stone houses and cobbled street occur every 10 to 20 minutes, and in between side roads and crossroads occur in the most unexpected places and chateaux and maisons pop up out of nowhere. Today I swear we passed Sleeping Beauty’s chateux and she must still be waiting for Prince Charming to wake her up; the whole property looked like it had just been halted in mid stride and was being gobbled up by trees and vines. We’ve also been fascinated that even the tiniest towns have very big well-tended cemeteries - I guess indicative of how long these villages have existed.
In the last few days we have seen some stock – though very few are ever visible. A few Friesian cows and another big rusty red breed and these had their big 3 or 4 month old calves still running with them. All the cows still have horns and tails and the sheep have their tails too! I guess all the others are indoors.......
Today as we drove we saw lots of ferns and big blackberry hedges covered with flowers which reminded me that on the Cinque Terre we’d seen huge blackberry hedges (just wild, not thornless) on waste areas, but also seemingly incorporated into people’s gardens. Today too, we saw several beautiful ponds and many with lovely pale and dark pink water lilies flowering. Maybe these were parts of large grounds belonging to hidden residences of maybe just ponds in the farmer’s paddocks, but very pretty.
In this area we’ve passed several huge log stacks piled up on the road verge – pine and maybe oak. At Port Nelson they’d be classed as shorts, but we think they’re probably made into pallets here and have seen a huge sawmill and pallet factory. OSH would be very busy sorting out these unsecured stacks in public places and also at some of the other weird things like loose handrails on battlements, terraces two metres high with no railings etc; but then, NZ does seem to have gone a bit far with some of this stuff. Briefly back to the tree growing; we’ve also seen many woodlots and the houses seem to have huge firewood stacks, so despite the fact our daily temperatures are ranging from 24 in the morning to 35+ later in the day, it looks like it gets a bit chilly here in the winter.
Home to pop the market goodies in the fridge and sample some of our cheese, veg and bread for lunch. I've loved sampling some of the local cheeses and yes Phil, we've had a fabulous big chunk of Roquefort we've been teaming up with some of the bold red wines! I also noticed another local blue called Fourme d'Ambert looking similar to the Roquefort so bought a piece and we did a comparison. I still prefer the Roquefort with its bite, but Fred preferred the slightly creamier more mellow Fourme d'Ambert. We've really enjoyed the sweet nutty (and very affordable) Emmenthal Francais for lunch and love the gooey bries. Today I had to turn down a huge chunk of brie which the excellent salesman at the market "couldn't cut smaller, will go dry" and would really have frightened the bank balance anyway. We compromised and he sold me a smaller peice of creamy, full of flavour St Nectaire which I'm thrilled to be munching on right now, with a very good local chardonnay as I finish my diary for the day while Bruce and Diana prepare to go out for a special dinner celebrating their meeting 35 years ago!!!! Well done eh!!!!
This afternoon we drove over to Thiviers. Apart from its claim (which couldn't win my enthusiaism) that it's the foie gras capital of the area and having a museum about the "craft", it offered us the railway station where we could book our tickets for Caen to Paris 4th July, plus a culinary shop where we could buy a very cool nutcracker (you'll know the sort Liz, just like yours - and we have to confess Fred has raided a few of your yummy walnuts..... thankyou.... great with the sultanas we bought at the market!!!)
Our second afternoon/evening stop was St Jean de Cole, rated as one of France's most beautiful villages. Yes; beautifully peaceful, with the uniquely paved humpbacked bridge - wide enough for an army of galloping knights (though I hope the poor horses were well shod). But there is a lot of work to be done here (which has been started in the Church dating from 1086) to reroof and make safe and habitable the dwellings in the village.