Saint-Flour valley

5 points of interest

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  History

  Le Pompidou

  Le Pompidou, like Saint-Roman de Tousque, owes its development to its location on the Corniche des Cévennes road. From the 17th century onwards, this former mule track carried substantial trade, with mule cart drivers bringing up salt, wine and dried fish from southern France to the Gévaudan, taking grains and cloth down from the uplands, and exporting the silk and chestnuts of the Cévennes. You can still see two buildings, the former inn (Le Cheval Blanc) and the Chapeau Rouge staging post, where travellers changed carriage horses.

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  Agriculture

  Small buildings

  The small buildings you see dotted here and there are jasses (from jas: place where livestock sleeps), sheepfolds of times gone by. There used to be at least 20 between Tartabissac and Bézuc. From the first warm days to 6 December, livestock would spend the night here, and their owners would come up during the day to watch them. An old saying goes, “No livestock in the chestnut groves before the sixth of December”. 6 December was the date of the fair in Florac when the local chestnuts were sold. Today Bézuc hosts 200 sheep for 8 months of the year.

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  Geology

  Contact

  At the Col de Tartabisac pass, there is a clear limit between the two bedrocks: on the left, the limestone plateau; on the right, a schist slope. The two rocks are in contact at a geological fault. A layer of very wet sandstone sits at the level of the meadows, at the foot of the limestone. This is where the water that has infiltrated via the thick layers of the Can plateau re-emerges. 

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  Architecture

  La Coste

  The architecture in La Coste is neat, with beautiful stone door frames and window frames and rounded corner stones. Renowned stone carvers and masons came from this Cévenol hamlet.

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  Architecture

  Saint-Flour du Pompidou

  The architecture of this handsome Romanesque church makes good use of the two local bedrocks (limestone walls, schist tilestones on the roof). Saint-Flour is believed to have been created by the Benedictine monks who sought refuge in the Cévennes from the 11th to 12th centuries. During the Camisard War, the vicar took refuge in Le Pompidou, which had a garrison of which St-Flour was an outpost. During the night of 26 and 27 January 1703, the Camisard leader Castanet and his lieutenant Jean Valmalle, known as The Rose, attacked Le Pompidou. The church and priory at Saint-Flour were set alight. During the French Revolution, the priory was sold to an inhabitant of Le Pompidou as the property of the French state. The church became a grange, and the presbytery was closed. In 1986, Saint-Flour was added to the supplementary list of historical monuments; in summer it is a concert venue.