France (3)

	Next stop on the trip was Gorge d’Heric, a fantastic climbing venue but would also be nice for just trecking. We bumped into an English couple Chris and Zoe who have taken a year off work for travel and climbing and are driving around in a Bedford Rascal motor home, they’re heading to Alicante in December so we may catch up with them there.

Carcassonne; “a place to see before you die”. With a title like that you would think it worth avoiding so as to live forever, but it’s definitely worth a short spell in purgatory. We managed to park up just outside the city and avoid the overnight 10euro charge for campervans, we are also getting used to finding the local dogging site now. Although Carcassone is quite a large town with lots of places to see, we spent the whole day in the Medieval Citadel. It’s history and architecture span back to Gallo-Roman and the years in between with the Cathars and Inquisition featuring strongly. It has 52 towers, 2 rows of fortified walls spanning 3km, a church, a castle and no Mac Donalds. In fact, 120 people still live inside the walls. We paid to go on a guided tour of the Castle and Battlements, which was all conducted in French. Even so, we still managed to get a lot out of it, and had a lot of fun with the little French we knew, and the helpful translations of other tourists. Lots of Monty Python references amongst the British contingence “fetche le vasche”, “cet un cadeau”.

Lunch was at a fantastic restaurant in the centre of the citadel, we both enjoyed the full three-course meal with the speciality of the region, Cassolet du canard, with a local wine. I’m not sure my guts were ready for the rich mallard meat as my arse was quacking for the next two days.

	We drove that evening to a small village high on a hilltop called Rennes-le-Château. A simple village until the late 70’s or early 80’s, Rennes-le-Château was relatively obscure; its peculiar history though was to bring it fame with the programs of Henry Lincoln and the hugely successful book ‘The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail’. The story simplified, is of a poor parish priest, Bérenger Saunier, who finds a parchment or scroll hidden in a wooden pillar of the chapel and through some unknown means obtains considerable wealth and influence.

There is a lot more esoteric information and a wealth of speculative ideas of the source of the fortune and this has lead to the legend of ‘Saunier’s Treasure’. This became such a problem with people digging holes all round the village and doing untold damage, that a law was passed banning digging for treasure in the local area. Needles to say we didn’t get caught, spade-in-hand, digging a hole for a poo.