We hadn't driven off on our own much and we needed a day wandering together—just the two of us. We left Neil, Lynne, Nora, and David to enjoy Uzes and the house on their own. We really did simply wander back roads, not worried about getting lost, but being again surprised by how totally rural it suddenly became. We were on narrow mountain roads that snake as wildly as any in the American West, hanging on the edge of cliffs and without many turnouts for passing. The payoff was coming across ruins and artifacts that were antique to us and taken for granted by the residents.
We began the day with a walk around the square in Uzes before going south and the back roads. The first things we encountered were far more ancient stone huts and some serious stone fences. We were curious about the fence design, which had a top tier of rock slabs tilted on edge almost vertically. Why? We had to wait for wifi to find out. Apparently, it's a way of sabotaging escape attempts by one's goats, which have bad experiences if they land on the pointed tops.
The huts are called bories or capitelles and are often still in use as animal shelters or as storage for feed. The region's readily split stone made this sort of architecture relatively easy.
We kept pulling into ghost towns that may have a few residents but have lost the village to emigration agriculture. One village still had a small, historic church that enjoyed a congregation and, thus, preservation. Next to it was a strange local museum that had nobody home and an open door. In a large courtyard, there were a few antique farm implements plus an amazing wall that had at least a millennium of architecture in it. Along a small side street, there was a Roman building now used as a garage.
Along the route, we came to streams, either in existing small towns or among the ruins of those abandoned, large, covered communal laundries. Many were still flowing and probably in full working order. Where there was water for all good purposes, so only recently mostly abandoned to modernity.
We had a few harrowing road thrills climbing out of a valley on a narrow road with switchbacks and inexplicable traffic. Well, there was an explanation, and we spent an hour exploring it and the woods around it. It is Ermitage Notre Dame du Saint-Sepulcre. It's effectively a park in a woodland that invites campers and is crisscrossed by farm roads. https://fr.wikipedia.org/.../Ermitage_Notre-Dame-du-Saint-Sépulcre
When we finally turned toward home, we discovered that we'd come south nearly to Nîmes. So, we took the main road back to Uzes in time for a wonderful dinner cooked by Nora and David and an evening talking and drinking wine on the terrace while the sun set spectacularly again.
