Descente en caisses a savon.

And now for something entirely different. A soapbox cart race through the streets of a local village that took place on Sunday 31 May 2009. I have made the photos into an audio slideshow, that will tell you all about the event. Enjoy.

Didn’t we have a lovely day the day we went to Pont-du-Chateau ?

Caffeine WARNING this post has many lovely pictures and may take a while to load. START it loading and go and make that cup of coffee you keep promising yourself.

Sometimes we are tempted from our mountain hideaway to the bright lights of the big city, tempted by our consumerist desires, we brave the crowds and the traffic. This time it was the need to buy materials for the renovation of the salle de classe, that we could not get locally, I say this time but in fact it is nearly always to buy renovation materials.

Having satiated our consumer desires, with the purchase of two suspended toilets, and 12 bottles of burgundian white wine, we found we had time to spare. A rare opportunity to explore! We therefore set of for Pont-du- chateau. Follow our progress through this historic town.

Pont du chateau is a small town with yes you guessed it a chateau and a bridge, and if you thought where there is a bridge, there must be a river, you would be right. The Allier is the river flowing down below the old towns ramparts.

The Chateau dates from the middle of the XVII century and is the work of Guillame Montboissier Beaufort Canillac and was financed by his friend Cardinal Mazarin. The Montboissiers were exiled to England in the 18th C. because of the Revolution.

The day was sunny and the newly arrived swifts filled the air with their shrieks. Like them our spirits took wing with the arrival of such a lovely day.We were not the only ones to be taking in the sun. Just below the Chateau the old men of the village enjoyed a game of petanque beneath the flowering horse chestnut trees.

The town is quiet and it is hard to imagine it as it was in its heyday as a thriving river port, in fact there were five ports just in Pont du chateau . Hundreds of miles from the sea, river barges carried all manner of goods from the Auvergne, coal, fir trees for masts for the Navy of Louis XIV, strong wine for Paris, paper from the paper mills of Auvergne well known for its quality and of course hemp for making ships sails. All of these goods passed through Pont du Chateau. The sailors, bargistes, porters who made the journey to Paris with the boats, many never returned preferring to stay after selling their cargo, breaking the boat up and selling the wood those that did not stay walked back to build another boat and make the journey again until they too had made enough money so they need not return.

The town is close to the administrative centre of the Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand and not far from the ancient cutlery producing town of Thiers. Well placed to trade with them both and to act as port for them both. 

 

St Martine church is a good example of its kind, unfortunately the door was locked so no photos of its painted interior . . .

. . . but hey stone coffin anyone.

Political concerns are foremost in the minds of many even in this quiet town, sharpened no doubt by the global financial crises, and the general consensus (correctly held or not, it is not for me to say) that the government of President Sarkosy is not doing enough to help the common man. The European elections could well provide a means to voice that discontent.

The Allier is like all rivers in the Auvergne and indeed all of the Auvergne clean and general untouched by pollution, and as such is home to the rare freshwater grayling a fish sensitive to pollution. Other species of note that can be found along the length of the Allier are salmon, beaver, and otter. The Allier springs in the Massif Central at 1500m altitude before pouring its waters into the Loire 421km later. It is funny to think that the rain that falls on our village some 70km away, by way of many streams and a tributary of the Allier passes under this bridge and thus to the Loire and on to the Atlantic.

The river, any river is quite  an apt symbol for the Auvergne. The Auvergne volcanic rock filters rainfall that is eventually bottled and then sits expensively on many a table, Volvic is but one name. In our village like others in the Auvergne our tap water is French mineral water taken from a spring rising in the village and piped to all the houses in the village, almost every pasture and meadow has water bubbling out of it. Rivers powered some of the first industry. Paper has been made in the valleys around where we live since the crusades at its height over 300 working water powered paper mills pulped and mashed reams and reams of paper. The always flowing river urgently making its way to the sea also reminds me that many throughout history have sought their livelihood somewhere other than the Auvergne, the rural exodus has left its own mark upon the landscape, abandoned houses and villages less cultivated land and more forest.

Hope you enjoyed your cup of coffee and the tour of Pont-du-Chateau.

Gerbil power.

This winter we made a ‘giant leap’ of our own. We pulled out the old central heating boiler which ran on gas from a tank buried in the garden, and installed a new boiler, that is ‘carbon neutral’ and runs on Gerbil food.

That’s right, amazing but true, you too can heat your home for less with Gerbil Power. Well I suppose I had better own up, they are wood pellets and not Gerbil food, but they look just like the pellets I used to give Bubble and Squeak, may they rest in peace.

The benefits are many:

• The cost of the fuel is more affordable.
• Because the fuel cost is cheaper we can heat the whole house and heat it to a comfortable temperature.
• No green house gases from heating the house and our hot water.

The affordability of the fuel, is certainly a big plus. When we were running the gas boiler we could only afford to heat parts of the house to 14° C in the winter and then supplement that with wood burning stoves in the principal rooms. Now we heat the house to 19° C , and use the wood burning stoves when convenient.

The biggest discernible effect is that the whole house is now warm, and we can enjoy all the rooms throughout the year. Less discernible is the reduced environmental impact that the new boiler has . I mean the polar ice caps have not stopped melting since we installed this, have they?

Wood Pellets Did you say?

The fuel is made from sawdust and wood waste from sawmills, which is compressed into  small pellets that looks like Gerbil food, (it does I tell you) this is then delivered by lorry and blown into our silo which is in the garage and can hold seven tonnes of the stuff, that's a lot of Gerbil food. Even better later this year a local factory will start producing the wood pellets from local sawmills, making the solution even more sustainable and cheaper  . . . . hurray for Gerbils !

The school room renovation.

The Salle de Classe is a rather large room attached to our house and was once one of the four schools in our village. It has a volume of some 350-400 metres cubed, with large south facing windows which are about 3m50cm(11ft and more) in height. When we moved in we used the room for storage, it made for an excellent and large FRIDGE.  But as we have slowly renovated the house, the furniture and our belongings have moved into the house proper. Although the large table wrapped in plastic on the right in the photo below, remains in the school room it is a full size antique French Billiard table, and rather difficult to move.

We are renovating the salle de classe to make it into luxury holiday accommodation a gite in French. Here is the story so far.

The first job that needed doing was to take down the ceiling, which was in a bad state of repair, cracked, holed and generally unloved and uncared for. Taking down the ceiling also gave us access to the roof timbers as we believed these to be a bad state of repair, although not bad enough to warrant a new roof. The ceiling was made of lathe and plaster in one half and brick in the other half and suspended from huge 30cm (12ins) square beams that ran the width of the room (7m/22ft).

 

The school room is interestingly built the large South facing windows run from the ceiling and stop at about 1m 20/4ft from the floor. Why? So that the maximum light was allowed into the class but allowed the minimum of distraction for the pupils, being well above their seated heads.

The Auvergne (the region in which we live) once was a very lively volcanic area, and most of the stone that is used in building is granite, from that volcanic activity. Our walls are made from granite covered with a crumbling crepi (plaster-like wall covering)  the walls are thick about 1m/3ft at the base and tapering to a slimmer 45cm/18ins at the roof line.

At one time the school room was divided into three rooms two classes one larger than the other and one cloakroom. The larger class had two small woodstoves, and the smaller only one. How they kept the rooms warm who knows, but more about that later.

 

 

 

OK well back to the hard slog of knocking down that ceiling, not to mention the mess it caused, the dust got every where, and the pile of debris you see in this photo is but a fraction of what was hiding above the ceiling, in the attic. Centuries of dust and debris, old shoes, faggots of wood, roof tiles and rotten oh so rotten floor boards.

 

 

Here are a series of photos showing my husband Andrew and a friend Phillipe chain sawing and lowering by rope the heavy beams that held up the ceiling.

 

 

 

In taking out these beams we found many that where either completely rotten or partly rotten. All the sections that were usable we planed and sanded and they have been re-used in the building to build the mezzanine floor. All the wood that we could not use either because it was completely rotten or partially  rotten was burnt in our wood burning stoves to keep us warm this last winter.

Now talking of wood burning, remember we talked a bit about the three wood burning stoves heating the school room when it was a school? Well in removing the ceiling beams we found that one of these beams that was close to a chimney, and remember these beams were 30cm/12ins square, had burned through in the middle completely for about 2.5m/7ft and then had been repaired rather badly. See the pic below.

And here is a close up. Well so what you may be thinking. Well in the last three years two houses just in our village have gone up in flames from roof trusses catching on fire from a chimney

 

Obviously the school room story is not finished yet, I will post another update on it in the coming weeks. As usual please let us know what you think in the comments.