Cros: the silk trail

7 points of interest

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  History

  L’oustalet des Italiennes

  This little house (oustalet) contained lodgings for the female workers, mostly from Italy, who were employed during silkworm breeding, to pick mulberry trees and, after the spinning-mills had been built, to unravel the cocoons.
  Local labour was also very important – everyone swung into action.

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  Know-how

  Les Arnaudes mill

  Like all mills at Cros, this one worked with a water reservoir, filled via a béal (canal) from the Vidourle river upstream. This wheat mill still has its millstones, engraved with the date of 1716. The first floor was set out as a magnanerie – a room dedicated to silkworm breeding – which was used until the 20th century. Some of the mulberry trees that supplied the worms’ food still stand in the surrounding area.

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• Agriculture

  From crops to forest

  Today, the village’s land is largely wooded, the forest having progressively spread since planting of crops and intensive farm use came to an end in the second half of the 20th century.
  Since the Middle Ages, land use in the Vidourle valley, as in all valleys in the lower Cévennes, had been divided into three, using a system that can be described by the Latin terms hortus (gardens), ager (cereal crops, meadows, grapevines and fruit trees), saltus (sheep pasture, chestnut trees, etc.)

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  Architecture

  The terraces of Mas Bourguet

  On the opposite slope of La Fage mountain, Mas Bourguet has a substantial spring, which ensures the village’s water supply. On the entire slope, terraces have been laid out to make cultivation possible. Stairs built into the thickness of the retaining walls let people pass from one terrace to the next. Everything is constructed out of dry stones, meaning without any mortar.

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  Architecture

  La Mazade hamlet

  The municipality of Cros consists of some ten hamlets. La Mazade (the Occitan word for hamlet) is one of the largest. In this plunging perspective, you can see, from right to left: the Protestant church; the Perrier spinning-mill; a house that has had a top floor added to set up a magnanerie; the Daudé spinning-mill; and other residences whose uppermost floors were used as magnaneries.

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  Water

  The Vidourle

  The Vidourle, a Cevenol torrent whose spring is at Saint-Roman de Codières, is a fickle waterway: almost dry in the summer, it can cause terrible floods in the autumn (the so-called Vidourlades), as it did on 17 September 2014. As it crosses Cros, the Vidourle even disappears underground, to reappear just before Saint-Hippolyte du Fort. Between Saint-Hippolyte and Sauve, it is once again subterranean, before re-emerging as the Fon de Sauve, which was long believed to be a real spring.

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  Architecture

  The spinning-mills

  Spinning-mills were not built at Cros until late, in the mid-19th century. Before that, the thread unravelled from the cocoons was sold at the Alès fair (24 August) or directly to the spinning-mills in Saint-Hippolyte and the wider region. Two spinning-mills were constructed within a decade: the Perrier mill in 1847 and the Daudé mill in 1856. They both closed in the 1920s, due to a lack of cocoons and outlets.

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