Nostalgia in the Cerdagne
Martine and I had travelled through the Cerdagne before, but never really stopped. It has always appeared as a very attractive area to us, so when our little group decided to spend a few days there, we were very happy, and it certainly did not disappoint.
The Cerdagne is a high, wide, open, undulating valley, backed by the big summits of the Pyrenees; these retained the perfect amount of snow when we arrived, so that ridges and peaks were outlined beautifully. From the point-of-view of landforms and, indeed, emotion, you enter the Cerdagne as you reach Mont Louis ( although the administrative boundary is a little further west). We were staying for a few days in one of a group of Alpine-style chalets, outside a small village, close to the ramparts and turrets of the Vauban-fortified Mont Louis.
Shortly after we got there, we met up with Lesley, and as she was taking Dog Digby for a short walk, we went with her, but we actually did not get far before we were stuck, almost transfixed, you might say, photographing a meadow beside the track. The backdrop to the whole scene is a big, handsome mountain, endowed at some stage with the rather mysterious name of “ Cambra d’Ase “; there are a few variations on this spelling. Although the name is clearly more Spanish or Catalan than French, the mountain, in its general appearance, ( if you ignore the difference in height ), could easily be Scottish. It is massive, relatively flat-topped, appearing like a big plateau-mountain, one of the Cairngorms, perhaps. And in the middle of the view we had, are the fine rocky buttresses and gullies of a big, glacial bowl or corrie, with bright patches of snow at the base of the crags.
If the background to our many pictures could have been Scottish, the foreground could not have been. It was, simply, a bit of meadow-awash with flowers, yellow and white, with patches of an almost-blue geranium. The yellow was provided in part by some hawkweeds and buttercups, but these were outnumbered by masses of the glorious globeflower, Trollius europaeus. (This is a flower known to me from a few richer places within the acid rocks of the Highlands, mostly now eaten to nothing by the hordes of red deer). The white, pure and lovely, was given by great numbers of a narcissus, just like a smaller version of the garden flower which is sometimes called “ pheasants’ eye “, Narcissus poeticus- and incredibly beautiful it was too. ( It turned out that we were very lucky to see them; within a few days, they were completely over ).
The whole effect was of the wonderful richness and glory of the natural world……
A couple of days later, my slightly nostalgic mood, ( engendered, I think, by the constant presence of that almost-Scottish mountain ), was increased when I found a plant which I remembered vividly from my childhood. I had seen it only once in my life, since the time I was climbing Ben Lawers ( a genuinely Scottish mountain, this time, and one renowned for its alpine flowers ) with my father, who was a keen botanist. We were traversing a broad ledge across a rock face ( slightly to my trepidation, I must confess ), when, amongst other small, exquisite plants, we found what looked to me rather like a pink daisy. This, it turned out, was quite a rarity: Erigeron borealis, ( alpinus now, possibly) , known in English as alpine fleabane. This must have been almost sixty years ago, but I vividly remember that single little flower . The specimen growing in the Cerdagne was recognisably the same, but significantly more vigorous.
And on the morning we left the chalet-beneath-the-mountain, we once again walked with Lesley and Digby, along the same track, but slightly rather further……..here, again, we were constantly stopping to photograph. Here I found another meadow, one which again struck a nostalgic chord. Just like the small hay-meadows of the remote Highland glen where I spent such important time in my childhood, its beauty was not made up of rarities, just of common flowers in glorious profusion. There were white oxeye daisies, yellow hawkweeds and buttercups, big red clovers and feathered grasses, and many smaller flowers. As a foreground to the still snowpatched mountains, it was perfect.
The rich landscape of the Cerdagne did not merely leave me with a real sense of fecundity and beauty, nor with this happy, rather nostalgic mood, but also provoked a significant question. I have been reading many environmental books lately, mostly about Britain and the loss there of farmland meadow-flowers, and the butterflies, bees and birds they sustain; nearly all the books blame “ intensification of agriculture “ during the years of the Common Agricultural Policy. Surely, though, these glorious meadows and rich pastures of the Cerdagne have been funded by precisely the same conditions of the CAP? Why does farming in the Cerdagne still give us such beauty, in great contrast to the sterility of much of the UK’s farmland?
