Wildwood by Roger Deakin

Author:Roger Deakin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141900513
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

Pyrenees

Autumn comes late to the wooded southerly slopes of the Spanish Pyrenees. The mountains are a natural climatic boundary between the rest of Europe to the north and the African Sahara to the south. My friend Andrew Sanders and I have climbed through the leafy fireworks of mixed beech, oak, maple, chestnut and hazel woods in a bright-blue morning up a steep track from Cantalops, an agricultural village in the foothills, to Requescens, a hamlet that is really a long farmhouse, extended down the generations, with a small bar-cum-restaurant, the Cantina, in one end.

Coming in sight of the place, we enter the circle of a hillside wood pasture of cork oaks. A dozen white geese graze outside a two-storey wooden shed with a worn staircase visible inside. Some of the oaks are deep ox-blood red where the sock of cork has recently been peeled, the year’s last two digits painted white on the tree as a reminder of its next date, in just under a decade, with the cork-harvesters. The grass is well trodden and manured with crusty cowpats. This is the home pasture for the cattle now out browsing in the woods. Entering the level farmyard, we are greeted by four dogs. An old mongrel bitch ambles over gently. The others, barking half heartedly, are chained beneath a big horse chestnut. A pointer slinks away back into the shadow of a firewood store under the house. One half of the old stone building is a magnificent ruin like a monastery, in the shade of a giant plane tree and a small lawn above the rocky ramparts looking south for miles across the hazy Catalan hills all the way to the sea.

Inside, the Cantina is all dark-brown woodwork and cream walls. The woodwork still bears the brush-stippled imitation grain once fashionable in the thirties. The corner cupboard, door and window frames, skirting boards and beams have all had the same ambivalent treatment, as though wood itself were simply too crude to leave unadorned. Cats lie outside the door and two woodmen sit talking in an even darker inner bar. We warm ourselves with coffee and press on.

It takes us three more hours to reach the top of the Puig Neulos, via a ridge from the Puig des Trois Thermes, along tracks through mixed deciduous woodland in a state of autumn carnival. For as far as we can see, the southern slopes are clothed in the rusty hues of hippy pullovers. Up high in the snow, ridges stretch away to east, west and south in a bloom of rosy-purple light glowing behind the pencilled outlines of the hills and mountains. To the west, Canigou and the higher mountain-tops are swimming in mist. Hollies, browsed over the years by cattle to domes or cones, hunker down either side of the ridge. Bonsai hawthorns no more than waist high crouch against the winds and snow. The small pale fawn or brindled cows are stocky and long-bodied, with half-moon horns. They clank about the glades mostly unseen, wearing bells on leather collars.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.