Hidden France: the Cévennes mountains

France receives more visitors than any other country, yet many beautiful spots
remain hidden, and few more so than the Cévennes mountains.

France is one of those countries that we think we know. This assumption is, in part, what shields
so many of her more secret places from invasion. And when I say we, I don't mean just we
British. The French, too, when they plan their long and frequent holidays, tend to stick to the
well-trodden axes of pleasure: the Alps for their skiing, Brittany or Normandy for their
spas, Provence for their long lunches by the pool . . .

These are all corners well-served by the French state's magnificent infrastructure but there are
other places, most of them off the beaten tracks of the TGV and the autoroutes – and where I
live in the Cévennes mountains is one of them.

Part of me is still wondering why, at the age of 43, I suddenly decided to uproot from a
comfortable life in central Paris and move to a part of France so wild and so remote that even
my best-educated Parisian friends, who had no difficulty rattling off the obscurest capital cities,
were unable to locate it on the map. They knew that the Lozère, the part of the Cévennes where
I would henceforth be paying my taxes, was the most sparsely populated départment in France.
And they knew that the cévenols – those taciturn, heavily defended peasants who feature in
Raymond Depardon's fashionable and rather condescending documentary on rural France, La
vie moderne – are mostly Protestant. For the French, a nation of lapsed Catholic pleasure-
seekers, the word Protestant evokes hard work, austerity and mirthlessness. It is therefore of
little surprise to me that, two years on, none of my Parisian friends has paid a visit.

For Parisians, the Cévennes is still the place described by the great 19th-century French
historian Jules Michelet: "The Cévennes offer rock, nothing but rock, razor-sharp shale. You feel
the struggle of man, his stubborn and prodigious labour in the face of nature."

And it is true that everywhere you go in the area where I live, La Vallée Française, you see
evidence of this struggle. You see it written on the landscape: in the dry stone walls and the
terraces carved out of the steep hillsides; in the beautiful sweet chestnut groves that still march
over so many of those terraces; even in my own roof, made of shale, each lauze carefully
chosen and laid like fish scales in ascending order of size, from ridge to eaves. Michelet was
right: it is a place of hardship. The Protestants of the Cévennes were brutally persecuted by the
French Catholic monarchy for more than 120 years.

Today it is still a place of rigorous husbandry. The nearest supermarket to where I live is half an
hour away on winding roads, so every one of my neighbours has a vegetable garden hewn from
their hillside; many have beehives on the furthest reaches of their land. Everyone has a log pile,
beautifully stacked outside their house – the measure of their industry and their readiness for
whatever nature can throw at them.

Because in this part of the world, nature can suddenly turn nasty. Most of the year the climate is
Mediterranean, softened a little in summer by the altitude. Winters are relatively short and mild,
with the occasional dusting of snow on the summits. So at first it all seems relatively gentle,
particularly to a Brit used to the annual tussle with seasonally adjusted depression. Cypress and
green oak thrive on the south-facing slopes, and you can find morels in April, chanterelles in
June and cèpes in October. At first I could not understand either the Parisian reluctance or
indeed my neighbours' dogged preparedness for the worst. But in my first autumn here, I
experienced an épisode cévenol: when cold air from the Atlantic meets warm air from the
Mediterranean, leading to dark cloud for days on end, apocalyptic rain, flash floods, broken
bridges, dead sheep, restive children, fretful fathers and unhinged mothers. When it ended, and
the sun came out, I found myself once again in the most beautiful landscape I had ever seen,
one peopled with individuals who gave the impression that they felt lucky to be alive, today, and
in this particular part of the world.

You come to these hills – like the writer's writer, Robert Louis Stevenson, did – to think and to
walk. Looking out over the Vallée Française from the breathtaking crest road that was carved
through the Cevennes by Louis XIV's dragoons in their pitiless campaign against the
Protestants, you will see little evidence of any change to the landscape since those times.
Nothing but tiers of wooded hills fading to the distance with tiny villages huddled around their
precious springs and linked by thousands of footpaths, still trodden by smallholders with their
goats. This is not a place for people looking for distraction or amusement. It is, and always has
been, a place of exile, a place to run away to.

I once asked a neighbour of mine, who was giving me a lift to the village in his van, if he still
noticed the beauty of the landscape he was brought up in. Without taking his eyes off the
winding road, he smiled.

"Nope," he said. "I drive over the mountain at sunrise every day and I see the mist in the valley
but I don't look at it any more. If I ever went away, though, that's when I'd miss it, and I wouldn't
be able to be without it."

People here are not smug, but they know that they have something precious and they carry that
knowledge like a secret worth having.

In his essay Spirit of Place, Lawrence Durrell said, "all landscapes ask the same question in the
same whisper: I am watching you – are you watching yourself in me?" It was without a doubt the
landscape of the Cévennes that drew me. What it was that I saw there of myself I'm not entirely
sure, but my father was raised by a Scottish mother near Stirling. When we went on holiday to
Provence when I was a child, he would soon become bored by the luxuriant heat that so
enchanted my mother, and together we would strike for the purple hills we could see in the
distance. The low-lying mountains that you see if you look west from vineyards of the Rhône are
a frontier. Beyond them lies another landscape, of craggy hills, mossy woodlands, vast moors,
rushing streams and stone bridges. These are close to the Scottish landscapes of my father's
youth. His fantasy, you might say, and not mine and yet the Gardon river in my valley flows
towards the Mediterranean, not the North Sea. Put simply, it is perhaps as close as France gets
to Scotland – or as close as I can get to my roots without betraying myself.

•  Places to stay: The Hotel Bourgade in Saint André de Valborgne (+33 4 66 566932), has
doubles from €55. In the village of Les Plantiers, Auberge du Valgrand (+33 4 66 839011) has
doubles from €65. There are no hotels in the Vallée Française but Gîtes de France has a
selection of self-catering cottage in the area. Search on the website for Sainte Etienne Vallée
Française, Moissac Vallée Française or Sainte Croix Vallée Française. Ryanair flies to Nîmes
from Liverpool and Luton and to Montpellier from Bristol and Leeds-Bradford. Easyjet flies to
Montpellier from Luton and Gatwick. London to Montpellier by rail with Rail Europe (08448 484
064) starts from £104.50 return.

Lucy Wadham is the author of The Secret Life of France (Faber)