A steep climb

5 points of interest

• 

  History

  The age of silk

  From the 19th century onwards, the silk industry developed in the Cévennes: tanneries gave way to spinning mills. The mills used water not only to treat the silkworm cocoons (which were boiled to prepare the silk) but also for the steam-driven spinning machines. In the second half of the 19th century, diseases strongly reduced silk production, which was also subject to competition from foreign silks and then from artificial silk. The silk industry went under in 1965.
• 

  History

  The tanners’ district

  La Calquière district gets its name from that of the ditches in which the tanners soaked their animal skins with limestone, which is called cauç or calç in Occitan. All along the Gardon there were tanneries because its acidic water was good for rinsing the skins, which was indispensable for obtaining high quality products.
• 

  Architecture

  The Château de Nogaret

  Built in the 11th century, the Château de Nogaret stood on the only road linking Saint-André de Valborgne with Le Pompidou. It is believed to have been constructed to serve as a stronghold and to defend the Vallée Borgne. It was set alight in 1628 during the war between the Duke of Rohan and Louis XIII, and again in 1704 by the Camisards, before being rebuilt in the 18th century. This private property still belongs to the Manoel de Nogaret family.
  “This small château is one of the finest examples of the fortified manor houses built towards the end of the Middle Ages by minor local lords wanting to free themselves, at least symbolically, from domination by their feudal overlords.” (Isabelle Darnas - Les châteaux médiévaux en Cévennes).
• 

  Know-how

  The sweet chestnut : a food tree

  You are in a grafted chestnut orchard, which means that the trees were maintained and their nuts harvested by locals to be eaten in the family. The enormous trees around you are about 300 years old.  
  The chestnuts were dried in a clède, a small building on two levels that was located either close to the dwellings or right inside the forest. The clède would have been in use for an entire month in autumn to ensure that the whole, wood-dried chestnuts could be preserved for a year.
  The chestnut tree was so vital in local subsistence farming that it was also called l'arbre à pain (the bread tree); it was also used to make beams, barrels, baskets, trunk-beehives and more, feed livestock and provide their bedding.
• 

  Water

  The gardonnades

  The village benefits from the water that the Gardon brings – but it also has to put up with the river’s sporadic bad moods. Abundant rain can rapidly raise river levels. It is often in autumn that the torrent overflows its banks. The worst floods can have dramatic consequences in both material and human terms. Many can still remember the floods of September 1958 and 2002, which caused much damage.