The Great Confluence

Gates controlling the flow of the bief...

Heading south into Castelfranc, you follow one of two river valleys:  La Masse, running directly south from the village of La Masse, Les Junies, Lherm, Les Arques, and eventually,  I think, Cazals;  or else Le Vert, running in more or less from the east,  from Labastide du Vert, Rostissac, St Medard and eventually, I think, Catus.  We seem to always be driving through one or the other of these valleys.  We're paying more attention to available river crossings these days, now that they have temporarily closed the D45 for construction at the village of La Masse.

Coming home to Castelfranc inside either of these valleys,  you can watch the hill system between them degrade until they both are wandering around, lost in a fertile valley.  This is the place they call Les Campagnes, (the Countryside), about the only good farmland in the town limits.  

By the time you reach Castelfranc,  it is Le Vert alone which empties into the river Lot.  In fact, it is really only at that convergence that you understand where Le Vert (the Green River) gets its name since it has an intense green color compared with the tobacco-brown of the Lot, loaded with soil from its eroded riverbanks.  

So where do La Masse and Le Vert converge?  This question haunted me for weeks.  More than once, I came one of runing off the road as I tried to scan the thick woods along the D45 for some inkling of a Y-shaped river form.    

At last Mrs Snoutsworthy and I were driven to discover the point of convergence on foot.   

But first, the plot thickened before there even was a plot.  For we found that one watercourse at the edge of town was neither La Masse nor Le Vert, it was a relatively large "bief" or canal.   The bief borrows water from the Vert  then repays it all near the Millhau factory.  So we ended up in a cul-de-sac:  bief to the right, Vert to the left, and a nearly dry-topped dam that was still too vertiginous for Mrs Snoutsworthy to cross without swooning.  

So we doubled back to the other side of the bief and followed the utility lane, Chemin les Pradelles, (but doesn't Pradelle refer to pastures?) serving the back sides of some of the industrial installations as well as some houses marooned there.




This lane has become the back alley of the industrial park of Castelfranc.   The biggest enterprise is a large but financially very shaky wine wholesaler.  

This part of town does not fit into one's postcard of a medieval bastide town, but it's a good idea to looks at the things that normally don't make it through such filters.  One grafitto read, in perfectly colloquial English, properly spelled to boot, surely learned outside the classroom,  "Fuck the world".    

A round coring in the masonry suggested to the ingenious young artist the right testicle of a penis.

An unrelenting battle is engulfing a fine old Quercy stone house.  The 911 runs along the front of this house:  It is almost completely surrounded but not yet surrendering.

Further along, you come to the New's house,  still holding its own.  "Anna New, tutor of voice production, pianoforte, and cello."

   

We left the road at a walnut grove and followed the left bank of Le Vert.  Soon we drew near to a Gypsy encampment.  Everyone in the region tells terrible stories about the Gypsies, many of whom live in disreputable winnebago parks next to rivers.  As we stole past the camp, we couldn't help wondering if later they would find just our bones whitening on the riverbank.  Still, it was a beaten down path we were following, meaning probably a whole lot of fishing going on.  

We kept resisting the temptation to give up, but the skitters on the the surface of the water hypnotized us into continuing.

One rill after another.

Until finally, the holy confluence.  It proved impossible to get a really good photo from the left bank, at least not without waders.

But there it is ok, in all its anticlimax.