The Mill is in the village of Fournoulès near the town of Maurs which is in the department of the Cantal. Jim and Brenda Grove will be living here from the end of February 2010 until late autumn.

Apart from the house which can sleep six there is a gite with two double bedrooms.
We will be happy to receive visitors, either as our guests for a few days or as paying guests for a longer period of time.
The following pictures and their descriptions give an idea of what to expect.

THE MAIN HOUSE
LIVING ROOM ....................................................................................DINING/KITCHEN














THE GîTE
The accomodation comprises: stairs to front door (own entrance), which opens to kitchen/living room with fridge, washing machine and gas cooker. Table to seat 4.
Hall with shower room off with separate toilet.
Two double bedooms, one with double bed, the other two single beds.
The furnishings are basic but cheerful. The rent is low.
€150.00 per week March and April, €200.00 per week May to September, €150.00 per week thereafter. Gas, electricity and linen included. Phone and broadband available in house.
NOTE: mobiles do not work on the valley floor - you have to go up the hill.

ENTRANCE .................................................... LIVING/DINING/KITCHEN













BEDROOM 1..............................................................BEDROOM 2














THE MILL

The Moulin du Clout is reputed to date from the time of the French Revolution over 200 years ago. The purposes of the mill were to grind grain into flour and to crush walnuts in order to extract the oil. Four milling rings can be seen, three with traditional millstones still in place and the fourth a stone crushing wheel in a circular trough. The driving mechanism, in the basement below, used four separate horizontal mill-wheels of a type unusual in Britain but still in use in France. Two of the four wheels have been removed to make way for the culvert that drives a modern electric generating turbine. The remaining two can still be seen and might be restored to use. One of these would drive the crushing stone. Much of the mill machinery, including hoists, hoppers, drive shafts, belts and a massive gravity press remain in place.

The Workings of the Mill

THE DOMAINE


The mill lies in the bottom of a deep valley in 8 hectares (20 acres) of fields and forest. There is half a kilometre of trout stream including a weir controlling a mill-race that feeds the millpond. There are four fields in the valley bottom and one on the shoulder of the hill where Coquette grazes, sometimes with a foal. Rocky crags in the valley sides have accessible flattish tops from which there are some fine views. Most of the domaine is woodland, mostly of sweet chestnut and oaks with some poplars in the valley bottom, walnut trees and several fruit: apples, peaches and cherries. The sun reaches into the valley from the east in the morning and from the west in the evening, when it is delightful to walk along the riverside track. There are resident heron, buzzard, woodpecker, tits, songbirds and a hoopoe has been seen. Deer, hares and a wild pig have been spotted in the valley.




















THE SURROUNDING AREA
WALKING
There is an hours circular walk from the Mill which is pleasant and we are hoping to prepare an onsite nature trail during the year.

CAR
A good many of the roads in the area are winding and narrow. However there are many beautiful and interesting places to visit: Figeac, Rocamadour, Conques, Rodez, etc















PUBLIC TRANSPORT
We have only tried a couple of train journeys. Once to Auriallac and to Toulouse. We have not travelled by bus (as yet).

ACTIVITIES
PLAYING WITH THE TRACTOR........................................MAKING APPLE JUICE












PREPARING.....................................................MAKING


COOKING........................................................................EATING PIZZAS!













It takes four hours to heat the bread oven,
an hour or so to prepare the pizzas, a few
minutes to cook them and no time at all to
eat them!

HOW TO GET THERE
BY CAR
We have done Portsmouth - Caen and Portsmouth - Le Havre ferry routes. Le Havre has the cheapest ferry. We usually get the overnight ferry and stop again at the Ibis hotel in Limoges. It is a long way and we find that spending time over the journey is less stressful, but of course, it is up to you. We can offer advice over the route.
We have also done the channel tunnel route stopping in Calais and Limoges.

BY PLANE
1. Bristol - Toulouse and then across town and the train to Maurs (a delightful, journey) where we can pick you up. We can collect you from Toulouse but it is 2½ hours away. We are prepared to do this if necessary.
2. Stanstead - Rodez. Usually a cheap flight (Ryanair). Peter and Jennifer Sain ley Berry have done it several times. We would collect you from there as it is an easy journey of about an hour.
In both of the above cases you can, of course, hire a car which will make you independent of us. Ask for route directions if you need them.

BY TRAIN
We haven't tried this method but I will do some research and post details when ready.
Brenda Grove


For articles about the Mill and related topics by Peter Sain ley Berry who has made several visits click on 'Read more' below. If you want to make a comment click on 'comments'.

NATURE TRAIL

I was idly listening to Brenda one day after lunch during our recent visit to her son’s Auvergne Mill. We were talking about walks, I think, when I heard her say ‘I want a Nature Trail.’

The tea was being made - a few minutes then to go outside in the sun. ‘Nature Trail?’ I found myself wandering up the unmetalled back road that leads up one side of the valley. Brenda’s remark had set me thinking.

Nature Trails should be circular, but the trouble with this is that the river Celé at this point forms a horse shoe, cutting through the high plateau, with the Mill at the end of it. This means that in order to do a circuit of the Mill you not only have to cross the river twice and the leat once but also climb up and climb down again the high valley sides.

I wondered.  I had already crossed the river once, by the Mill’s own bridge. Now if I just climbed the first ridge.......? I looked above me. At this point the ridge is a jumbled landslip of grey rocks - big and square - almost as though a giant’s baby had overturned his tray of building bricks. It was covered with heather and moss, but didn’t look too difficult. Seizing an oak sapling I hauled myself up, block by block.

Once at the top I could see over into Coquette’s field - named after the fat, sad and greedy pony who belongs to the neighbouring farm and who grazes the field occasionally. Having climbed up the ridge I had now to descend. I decided I would not go back the way I came. Onwards and downwards then, towards Coquette’s field. The ground looked quite smooth, though steep. Fortunately plenty of saplings meant I keep my footing.

At the bottom ran a low retaining wall - about six feet in height. I would have to jump this. What was the ground like underneath? Uneven certainly and with stones. I leapt, hedging my bets, planning to land with one foot on a flat stone, and one on the ground. All well.

Now it was simple to cross the field to the river where I knew that a young oak had been washed down in last winter’s floods and was lying lodged in the tree roots on either side of the bank. The river is not very wide at this point: twelve or fifteen feet perhaps and the tree trunk was maybe six foot above the water. No matter there was little water in the river. If I slipped I should have a nasty fall.

I hesitated. Then I remembered one of the Hornblower stories in which he leads a party of men along a ship’s yard to invade the rigging of an enemy ship. This trunk lying across the stream must be about the thickness of a ship’s yard I thought. Yes, I can do it. In no time I was safely across.

So now I was into the Leat field - through which is dug the leat that carries water from the sluices at the weir to the millpond, running in a trench four metres above the river. No problem to cross this as there’s a concrete bridge so that tractors may pass from one field to the other.

From the weir I had what I thought would be a difficult climb - straight up through a grove of holly trees to the crag that marks the boundary of the Mill’s land on the main drive that leads down to the Mill from the village above. Though steep it was easy enough with plenty of handholds and footholds.

I was reliving my childhood, the pulse racing, grizzly bears about to emerge from the sweet chestnuts that line the roadway. Where was my racoon hat? My deerskin jacket? Had I had enough. I’d gone about three quarters of the way and from the roadway I could simply have walked down the drive to the Mill to collect my ever cooling tea. But I would not have completed the circle.

From a little below the crag, on the other side of the roadway, there leads a forest trail cut to bring timber out of the dense woodland. It climbs sharply up the hillside to meet a confluence of such trails directly above the Mill. That’s where I headed. Here is to be found also the well that provides the Mill with its water, a plastic hose snaking down the mountain.

The trails haven’t been used for a long time. The forest is overgrown and fallen trees make vehicle access, even with a tractor, impossible. To someone on two legs, however, fallen trees present no problem.

Then, high on the hill I heard a tinkling sound. Like something from Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ - He jangled and jangled and jangled his bell. Someone was ringing for me with the old hand bell kept to summon folk in from the fields just as in my growing-up days, my parents would jangle to summon me from the bowels of a hidden cellar or outhouse attic.

I shouted in reply, but the forest simply absorbed my sound. And still the bell rang. Maybe an emergency! No question then of searching out a convenient and happy way to descend the long steep and bramble-thicketed hillside to the walnut trees on the Mill’s lawn that I could see far beneath me. Straight down then.

At least it was impossible to fall for the brambles gripped me like thorned string. I tore and tumbled my way downwards, eventually running out on to the lawn out of breath and adrenalin pumping a few minutes later.

‘What’s the problem?’ I shouted.

‘Your tea’s cold,’ answered Brenda.

But at least I had completed the circuit.

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AT HEAVEN'S GATE - ROCAMADOUR

Before we left the Mill, we drove over to Rocamadour, to which we had never been before. It’s a fairish distance from our corner of the Cantal - about and hour an a half - and feels longer cramped in the back of a car. It’s a religious site, a place of pilgrimage - a deep gorge on the side of whose vertiginous cliffs.....well, let me tell the story.

Saint Amadour is one of those obscure early saints that litter the Catholic calendar. I presume he was male, for I doubt a woman would have chosen to live her life, as he did, three quarters of the way up a towering rocky cliff, like some species of seabird. He began as a hermit making a cliff-side cave his hermitage and meditating on the view. Subsequently, he was joined by other hermits who took over other caves. Hermits indeed being social folk despite appearances to the contrary.

In due course Amadour died. Perhaps he had had enough of the view. Anyway, the other hermits carved a sarcophagus for him out of the soft rock, still some three hundred feet or so up this crag, and sealed him in, no doubt accompanied by the usual ceremonies that hermits engage in when one of their number departs for an even greater hermitage at a still more elevated altitude.

And that was that. Nothing much happened for five or six hundred years. But then, just after the turn of the millennium, (that’s the first millennium, not the one just gone) someone came across the Amadour tomb and decided - in true Halloween style - to open it up.

And in true Halloween style old Amadour did not disappoint. For there he was, presumably still fully clothed, and perfectly preserved. Which, when the Pope came to hear of it, was enough to have old Amadour beatified and for the cliff to be re-christened Roc-Amadour and for people to make pilgrimages there for the next thousand years.

Indeed, so well has the little community of Rocamadour done down the ages out of their perfectly preserved hermit that one is tempted to think that perhaps someone removed what remained of Amadour and popped a succession of recently deceased locals into the tomb when anyone came to inspect. But to think that would be to remove the magic.

For Rocamadour is magic - pure spiritual magic - carved in white stone. There’s the little town at the base of the cliff, full of hotels and restaurants and boutique-y shops selling tourist porn - the endless cheap (and not so cheap) souvenir tat, much of it made in Asia, that disfigure any site to which international tourists flock like so many seagulls on a rubbish tip.

But from this unenterprising beginning leads ‘Le Grand Escalier’ - a great staircase of 226 stone steps mounting towards (but never actually reaching) the cliff top. It is a staircase to heaven.

As one mounts, in a series of zig-zagging flights, interrupted by oases of elegant medieval piazzas, you feel you are leaving behind the material things of the world and approaching something pure and spiritual.

You leave behind the modern world with its cars and shops and ascend to the early middle ages. An ecclesiastical building blocks your way - you pass through a door - but then you see that the edifice has only one side. You pass through a wall but the far side is open and the stairway draws you on and ever upward.

Finally you reach the Church of the Black Madonna with its great stained glass window beside the tomb of Saint Amadour - or rather the bottom half of the sarcophagus carved into the rock. Above you - and worryingly over you - towers the rest of the cliff, which actually overhangs this religious ‘city.’ Worse still, the overhang is built on, which makes you feel that it is only the whim of the Almighty that prevents the entire cliff collapsing like the Twin Towers with each upper collapse taking out the floor beneath. No wonder pilgrims tremble.

I am not a religious person, but, as I stood within the walls of this beautiful, capacious church with its high vaulted roof, suspended as it were between earth and sky, accessible only by a staircase of 226 steps, it was easy to understand why it had for almost a thousand years become a pilgrimage for Kings and Christians.

Hamlet’s words “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” came to mind.

A row of candles burnt brightly in the dim religious gloom: votive offerings which I used to be encouraged by my old great aunt to make when she was alive. I feel her nagging at me still to 'put a candle on,' whenever I enter a Catholic church. Usually I resist.

This time, quite overcome, I dropped my two euros into the box and lit a flame. After a token prayer I turned around and descended the staircase again in bright sunshine.

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THE CHESTNUT FESTIVAL AT MOURJOU

They roasted the chestnuts on iron grills two metres or more in length and perhaps a metre in width. Two of these monsters sat in the field with what looked like old wooden fencing posts burning beneath. After a time the chestnuts were raked off and tipped into giant bins, the sort that you might use for cattle feed, and then manhandled up the slope to the festival.

Eager hands then scooped the steaming mass into those little plastic trays that you find in take-away restaurants. An incongruous, if useful, blending of ancient and modern ways. We paid our two euros or whatever and tucked in: the chestnuts, hot, sweet and woody, the essence of autumn. In the background bagpipers wailed.

To wash down your chestnuts, the festival offered a choice. Apple juice or cider - sold in one or two litre bottles. Both looked identical, the thick smudgy, amber colour of freshly pressed apple. We chose the juice. The stock of bottles flew off the shelves as fast as the chestnuts. More bottles arrived. From where, we wondered.

At the back of the stall stood a large rectangular trailer. From the back extended two pipes, each with a tap. And from these ran the supply of juice and cider. A man sat on the towbar, filling the bottles. How practical! But enough, surely, to give apoplexy to those whose heart’s desire is to keep the population secure behind racks of regulations.

As we ate, the wailing bagpipers materialised and performed a little dance. Their pipes were medieval, the sort you see in early paintings of people enjoying themselves, by people like Brueghel.

The pipers were not trying to be medieval. It was just, I suppose, that in these Auvergne recesses things have not changed much in 600 years. Apart from the plastic trays the chestnuts were then as they are now. The only thing that might have changed was the language.

Then the people in these parts spoke Occitan and by the attempts made to write things (the labels on the cider bottles for instance) in Occitan, it appears that it is due for a comeback. We even picked up a freesheet in English telling us how to pronounce Occitan words.

On a casual acquaintance the language seems to bear the same relation to French as Catalan does to Spanish, that is a sort of half-way house between the two, but leaning a little more to the one than the other. Once this language was spoken pretty much everywhere south of Bordeaux and Montlucon, except for the area round Perpignan, where presumably they spoke Catalan. Anyway it is an enormous area.

And in this little part, down at the bottom of the Auvergne in the Departement of the Cantal (otherwise only famous for being the spot from which hailed Georges Pompidou, the French President who grandly let Britain join ‘Europe’ in 1972) they grow chestnuts. That is, you might say, their ‘raison d’etre.’ Or was.

Did you know that in 1920, La Chataignerie (The Chestnutery) produced half a million tons of chestnuts, which were consumed up and down the land? No doubt, after the First World War had eliminated much of the young farming workforce, there wasn’t much else to eat but half a million tons is a lot of chestnuts.

Eighty years later this has fallen to a mere 10,000 tons, a fifty- old decline. Most of the chestnuts today are simply left to rot or be eaten by wild boar.

Still, at Morjou the object is to make you consume chestnuts. I noted that the organising committee limited their stall holders to a maximum purchase of two tons. This seemed a triumph of optimism. However delicious they may be, there is a limit to the number of roast chestnuts one can eat.

I estimate it would take 16,000 people to eat their way through two tons. Mind you, you would be amazed at to just how many uses the chestnut can be put. Ground into flour it finds its way into all sorts of breads, cakes, pastries, pancakes. You find chestnut honey and chestnut jam and chestnut preserves of every kind. There are decorations made of chestnuts, candles, ornaments....there are cosmetics.

And after eating you can visit the chestnut museum and demonstrations of the superb qualities of chestnut wood (it is straight-grained and so splits evenly, comes with is own preservative to resist attack by wood boring insects and spiders; if you look at a chestnut roof you will find no cobwebs.)

Earlier we bumped into Nigel, an Englishman married to Susy Atkins an American potter who runs the superb Don pottery, now in a brand new exhibition centre high on a hill, just over the Cantal border. Until a couple of years ago the pottery inhabited an achingly beautiful eighteenth century mansion, all windows and turrets and covered with lovely scalloped blue grey slates, in a deep Auverngnat cleft. The house remained unsold, he said ruefully, though the price had come down.

I suggested he sought out a lingerie manufacturer.

“A lingerie manufacturer - why?”

“Thongs of the Auverne.”

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MUSHROOM FESTIVAL AT PRUNET

We were in the ironmonger's, for some reason, in Maurs, buying something important for the Mill - light bulbs, I think it was, or it may have been something to do with the apple press bought a year ago at great expense -when it occurred to us that we had nothing planned for Sunday - and Sunday was tomorrow. "Let's go and look in the tourist office," said B, who is the most practical person I know. So we did.

The Cantal Departement is off the beaten track at the best of times. You wonder why they bother having a tourist office at all, but they do and its Maurs outpost is quite a handsome affair of wood and glass that squats on the pavement of the Place d'Europe among the speckled trunks of plane trees. The week's events are pasted on an A board outside, a bewildering array of activities to cater for every taste.

Unfortunately, when we had eliminated those events that were too far, or too expensive, or which ended yesterday, or which involved boats or large animals, there wasn't much left. "So it's the mushroom fair then," I concluded, trying to sound enthusiastic. "The mushroom fair at Prunet."

Now as you probably know the word mushroom in France covers the whole gamut of edible fungi, some of which are greatly prized by folk who appreciate their food. There would be stalls and sideshows, said the tourist bumpf and the event would begin with the induction of new fellows into the sacred mushroom brotherhood and end with a championship, the winner of which would be declared French national amateur mushroom omelette making champion.

So after Sunday breakfast we set off under a grey sky and spots of drizzle to see if we could find Prunet which, according to the map, lay about forty minutes drive to the north east. By the time we had arrived the spots had turned to a respectable drizzle, but there was music - of a strange Celtic kind - playing from a loudspeaker on every lamp post, lots of bunting and men walking about strangely clad in cloaks of yellow-green and tudor style squashy hats. As they looked eminently knowledgeable about mushrooms we presumed them to be the mushroom brotherhood and watched our step lest they deigned to turn us into a can of Campbells soup.

Now in case you are thinking that Prunet must be a fair size to host a national omelette championship, you would be wrong. Prunet turned out to be just about a small a place as you could find that qualified for a name on the map - a sort of French, Little Puddletown on the Marsh. It had a church, with an enormous belfry, a few houses, one or two farms and that was it. The much trumpeted mushroom fair seemed on the same scale.

A few stalls sold cheese, sausage, wine, vegetables, bread - but unaccountably no mushrooms. Elswhere, an earnest young man was trying to show a film about mushrooms in a tent, while another earnest young man with an encyclopaedic display of 'mushrooms' on a table, bent the ear of the few passers-by to explain the botantical differences between a bracket fungus and an oyster mushroom and that was about it.

The young farmer selling his Salers cheese also possessed an earnest looking air as he told us that it took 450 litres of milk, from his own Auverngnat herd, to make one 25 kilo truckle the size of a mill wheel. He was selling the cheese for a song - a kilo for 12 euros - so we took a great hunk and two bundles of little dried sausage to go with it.

Of course, no fair is complete without a beer tent, which in this case wasn't a tent at all but one of those round wooden contraptions favoured for fairground sideshows. One lot of young men were inside this contraption and another lot were outside. The men inside were dry and the men outside were wet, for by this time the drizzle had matured into common or garden rain. Yet the men outside seemed not to mind because they were knocking back something provided by the men inside. It was called 'Bolée du Satan.'

We tried one very small plastic cup of this and I have to say it was very good. Indeed, I was reflecting how a few of these might make one impervious to all sorts of precipitations, when our attention was diverted by the antics of two bullocks yoked to a bullock cart in a way that made it appear that this was something of a first time experience both for the bullocks and whoever was in charge of the yoking.

For whenever the cart encountered an obstacle the bullocks kicked and skipped causing the cart to swerve violently. Fortunately, it was empty. If it ever had a cargo that would have fallen out long before. Maybe that was why there were no mushrooms at the fair.

Not far away hummed an old field bake-oven, an enormous wheeled affair that looked as though it might have done service in World War One. From this came a number of different breads, samples of which were set before us in little bowls.

Some contained fungi, though whether it was this or whether it was the mobile bake-oven, none tasted appetising. Slightly more appealing were the bun shaped loaves, sliced in half, the middle scooped out and filled it with mushroom soup. These were selling for 2 euros, which seemed a bargain. Surprisingly, they didn't leak.

Sadly, we found that we had brought sandwiches and therefore decided to eschew the loaves filled with mushroom soup. Besides I had the feeling that the soup and the Bolée du Satan might not mix too well. So we decided that it was time to retreat to the dry safety of the car.

On our way we passed the omelette making championship tent, sadly deserted in the rain, but complete with a yellow podium on which the numbers 1, 2 and 3 were marked out in black.

To tell the truth I was rather attracted to the idea of becoming a mushroom omelette making champion of France, even if amateur. To judge by the number of people in Prunet who had not succumbed to the embrace of the Bolée du Satan, I reckoned that I must have been in with a very good chance of making at least one of the podium slots. What would being the third champion amateur mushroom omelette maker of France count for in Cowbridge I wondered?
"Oh do stop dreaming, Peter" came a voice from in front. Ahh - it was ever thus.

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DONGLING IN LA FRANCE PROFONDE

Ever since lightning struck maliciously at the Mill two summers back changing in a smoky instant our Livebox into a deadbox, we have lacked a broadband connection on holiday. It’s simply not worth re-installing and maintaining the connection. Nevertheless, to live without broadband these days is becoming miserably impossible.

Quite apart from the need to respond to urgent enquiries from our small business back home, broadband is essential these days to settle arguments over the dinner table (I’ll just Google that) even indeed to prepare dinner in the first place, the WiFi laptop having long since displaced the stained recipe book as the fount of knowledge on matters culinary.

My good friend Brenda, has partially overcome this broadband problem by buying a dongle - a little rectangular box of electronics that plugs into your computer and gives you broadband through a mobile phone signal.

I say partially because, being a water mill and at the bottom of a steep forested valley, the Mill is just about the only place in France out of range of a mobile phone mast. No matter, climb out of the valley and there you are.

Brenda bought her dongle in Britain, which posed another problem - not technical this time, but financial. With charges for log-on and roaming the British dongle is hideously expensive to use abroad.

So I thought I would go one better and cleverly buy a French dongle to use in France, which operation I had thought would be easy. Well you would wouldn’t you in these days of internet? I had reckoned without the pervasive tentacles of French bureaucracy.

Still in Britain my first hopeful stop was Orange’s French website. There I recognised just the thing, advertised at a mere €9 (£8.50), pay-as-you-go with two hours of internet access included. ‘Could I buy this,’ I asked the helpful enquiry line? ‘Yes,’ they said, provided we can deliver it to you in France. Just fill in your details and we’ll despatch it to the Mill forthwith.

But ‘the details’ included, as an obligatory field, my city of birth and its ‘département;’ I was born in Edinburgh, I told the enquiry line and despite the best endeavours of Napoleon, Mid-Lothian was not a ‘département,’ the last time I looked. ‘Just enter 99, then,’ came the reply. So I did. Obvious really!

I filled in my credit card details as well and duly clicked on the ‘place order’ button, only to receive a message that the site was ‘presently’ unavailable. As I groaned away at this setback, up popped a helpful text box that said ‘I’m Julie - can I help you?’ or words to that effect. ‘Yes,’ I said, clicking and sending. ‘Julie’s’ response was then to crash my computer.

Now I have a Mac and it takes a virtual earthquake to crash a Mac, but Julie managed it three times. Whenever I laboriously filled in my details and tried to order my dongle, ‘Julie’ would pop up like a siren from the ‘presently unavailable’ site luring my poor Mac on to the rocks of cyberspace.

When I told the help line, they suggested I bought my dongle in an Orange shop in France.

So there I was in in the beautiful medieval town square of Figeac, famous for being the birthplace of Champollion, the hieroglyphic decipherer, queueing up to buy my dongle in the ultra modern ‘boutique Orange.’

They would be glad to help they said, and yes they had plenty of dongles in stock. However I should have to pay €39 but, no matter they would refund €30 to my bank account. ‘Do you have a French bank account?’ asked the assistant. Er.....no!

In that case, she said rolling her eyes, I can’t sell you a dongle. We have to identify you through your bank account and a British one wouldn’t do.

It was why the website was ‘presently unavailable’ she added almost apologetically.

Things were starting to take on a Pythonesque tinge. This is the European Union, I wanted to say. Where we are all encouraged to move about and work freely across a vast single market and you won’t sell me a pay-as-you-go product without a French bank account?

I was raging. Orange had told me I could have a dongle. I had promised people I would be available on email. Time was passing. I sat down at a café table to ponder, head in hands and near to tears in sheer frustration.

I had brought the Mac with me to the Orange shop. Something made me open it - but what was this? The emails were flooding in. The gods had relented. Maybe I didn’t need the dongle after all. Wonderful! Well, up to a point.

We learnt subsequently that most libraries in France provide free public WiFi - though not all the time. Don’t bother trying in the evening - or on a public holiday. Nevertheless, provided I could find a library during working hours I could reasonably hope to connect with the wider world.

This had some advantages. I spent a very happy hour working on despatches from the further flung parts of my little empire while sitting in the open-air under the chestnut trees, outside the library in the pilgrimage fortress of Conques which we happened to be visiting. But I needed something closer to home.

Searching for the library in Maurs, and rehearsing my tale of dongle-woe to Brenda and her husband, a kindly Englishman interrupted our conversation. ‘Try SFR,’ he said. SFR being an alternative provider of mobile telephony. But of course there was no SFR shop. At least not in Maurs.

Still the next day we were bound for Cahors, a town large enough for us to be reasonably assured of finding an SFR shop. And there I actually succeeded in buying an SFR dongle, though not before completing a mountain of paperwork with the photocopier pressed into service and no less than three sets of documents to be sent off in due course, including two by me.

Why? This was a pay-as-you-go dongle. No contract. Why do they need to know all my details - identity, addresses, bank, copies of invoices, barcodes and so on? The transaction must have taken a good half an hour and cost three times more than chez Orange - if, that is, I had managed to buy a dongle chez Orange. Moreover, I was still faced with this silly system of having to pay them twice the cost of the product and then having €30 returned to me through my bank account, a procedure in which I had little faith at all. Still, at last I had my dongle.

But still the gods had not finished toying with me. The dongle came with instructions - nicely illustrated computer screens in both PC and Mac versions. Unfortunately, when I plugged it in after the three hour wait that I had been advised would be necessary the screen that my computer threw up did not correspond at all to any of the screens in the pamphlet. Worse, the computer was asking for a password, which I had not been given.

Meanwhile, the dongle just kept blinking its little light, looking all white and smart. Efficiency itself if it would only work.

Oh dear! I tried loading the CD that came in the pack. That seemed to do more harm than good. Mac was now throwing up a complicated message telling me that there was an error reading the ‘statement heading message,’ whatever that meant.

I went back to square one and rebooted. The error message disappeared, but the screen insistently demanded a password. My eyes brimming with frustration I typed in at random my Mac password.

And behold! The dongle which had been blinking lazily went suddenly into overdrive, flashing like a thing demented. Windows appeared and disappeared on my screen telling me that data were being downloaded and installed. Suddenly it was all done. We were in touch with the world. I felt as though I had climbed Everest!

There was still the little problem of accessing a signal at the Mill. But there’s a back road that leads up the mountain towards Mourjou. Half way, almost enveloped by the spring flowering yellow broom, is a convenient ledge from where you can look out over the adjoining valley. There, on a little hillock, stands the ruined Chateau de Merle.

Merle means blackbird in French and Blackbird Castle is perhaps not a bad name for the site of a mobile phone mast. Sitting on this ledge I found a signal.

Needless to say I still have yet to receive my €30 of ‘rémise.’ But at least I have a working dongle.

I am lying in the meadow surrounded by buttercups, In my supine position underneath the walnut tree they are now taller than I am. The strong sunshine of late May filters through its young leaves, dappling the grass and the wild flowers. I have taken my top off and chew idly on a long stem of grass, enjoying the sweetness. The sunlight warms my back just as the grass scratches my front. Close by I hear the Mill stream which babbles and tumbles beneath the deep green branches of a medlar tree, now covered with spring blossoms, each like a Tudor Rose.

It’s ready for cutting this field: to make hay for the winter. I say field but it’s more the size of a small paddock - or even a great lawn. Tear-shaped, it is hemmed in on two sides by the curve of the busy stream and on the other by the tree-lined track along which the mules, the only animals strong enough for these hills, used to plod with their cargoes of flour and walnuts for grinding in the Mill. No doubt the animals would enjoy a momentary rest in this paddock before the return journey, munching the same grass as I am munching now.

I am reminded of revising for my ‘A’ levels in just such dappled sunlight, lying semi-naked under a weeping ash. I am no longer revising for my exams, of course, though I am still trying to commit words to memory. Before me lies the play text of ‘Art,’ and I am learning my part. But my memory, once sharp, is now dull. Over and over I go, but to little effect.

Idly I count the wildflower species. I make it ten - that is ten that are actually flowering with something that is recognisably a flower. Biggest are the penny moon daisies, but then come the campion, coltsfoot, dead nettle, white and purple clover, dandelion, ladies mantle and of course the buttercups. Deep in the grass the little speedwell nestles, flecking the green tangle with a fairy dust of blue.

The fauna is there as well. No sooner am I settled but a spider crawls across my page - going where I want to ask him? A bee, of some indistinct family, buzzes around the buttercups, followed at a safe distance by an equally indeterminate species of fly. Is the fly cleaning up, I wonder, after the bee? Above me, I note a hover fly in hover mode. It appears to be watching me, but when it sees me looking it zigs away, backwards. Forwards, backwards - if you are a hover fly I don’t suppose it makes much difference.

Now, here comes a butterfly. It is of medium size, orange with many brown spots, almost too perfect to be anything but a man-made Chinese creation. It flutters about elegantly from flower to flower, slowly and without effort. Some species of fritillary, I suppose. If it has noted my presence in its field it has not shown any sign.

The crickets hunt me too. Across the field their endless rhythmic chirping creates a comforting ambiance. One can never feel lonely in a field of crickets. But they do have a habit of edging closer and as I persist with my futile line learning I can hear one somewhere near my feet, or so I judge. It sounds horribly loud and like a lawnmower.

I glare angrily, for he is disturbing my concentration. He quietens, but starts again as soon as I turn back to my book. He must be watching me, this cricket. No doubt there are birds watching him, or trying to. But if so I don’t see any. In this forested country, we hear a constant distant twitter of birdsong, but they are wary creatures. Too many guns, I suppose. Only the big flecked buzzards show themselves clearly as they wheel in the high sky, riding on the thermals that rise up the sun-warmed rocks.

All afternoon I have been collecting wood with the tractor. It’s a heavy task, sawing down the young shallow-rooted oaks killed by the heat wave of three years ago and bringing them back to the Mill’s great barn for firewood. Besides oak we pull chestnut, hazel and alder trees out of the river or from where the winter’s floods have left them high on the river bank. We fill the tractor’s box - it must hold about a ton - and then drive home again the tractor lurching and rolling on the uneven ground.

It’s a muscle-aching task and perhaps that’s why I want only to lie somnolent on this grass with the late afternoon sun warming my back and the cuckoo calling gently in the woods, dreaming of the herby pastis I took this elevenses instead of coffee, or the glass of chilled rosé from the slopes of Provence that I shall have shortly on the terrace, when the sun goes in.

These days there's no trouble at t'Mill!