`Take the time to take time' in Gascon
Source: Toronto Star (Original Article)
AGEN, France–There is the romance of moving to a rustic pigeonnier in the south of France – and the reality of shovelling out its 87-centimetre-deep carpet of fossilized pigeon poop. There is the dream of cooking up rustic fare in a farmhouse dating from 1724 – and the alarming fact that a tree is growing up through its rotting kitchen floor.
Two decades ago, Kate Hill fell under the spell of Gascony, a region that feels untrampled, unspoiled and authentically French.
"I didn’t come with a commitment to stay. It just snuck up on me. I’m still not bored, that’s all," she says with a shrug and a smile.
Tall and bold, her salt-and-pepper hair cut no-nonsense short, her voice grows soft as she explains, "My eyes are never sated with the beauty of the countryside of Gascony. I’m still seduced by this place. And as long as the seduction continues, I stay."
Visitors here ramble over sunflower and poplar-lined roads with nary a car in sight, lanes so spectacular they would be clogged with traffic in Provence. They privately inspect mosaics and baths among the ruins of an excavated 4th century Roman palace in Seviac, an archeological find that tour groups would swarm in Rome.
They explore the residence of the first Bourbon king and France’s favourite: not the ostentatious Versailles of prissy Louis XIV, but the Nerac chateau of Henri IV, a swashbuckling outdoorsman and serial womanizer who used to joke, in his thick Gascon accent, that he surely would have been hanged as a thief had he not been born a king.
And they can scuttle down the drained moat that encircles Larresingle, the tiniest bastide in France – a petite "a pied" version of the massive medieval Disneyland a couple of hours drive east in Carcassonne.
Gascony is a place where geese and cows outnumber humans, and where the most exciting village event each weekend is perpetual petanque played Best Credit Card Rate by young men toting cigars and …continue reading