The Closing of the Land

It has always seemed to me that a landscape tells you most about itself in the moment it begins to close. The road that comes off the Monédières and touches its lowest point at kilometre one hundred and twelve does not stay low; it gathers itself almost at once and begins to climb again, north and a little west, toward the small commune of Madranges, and as it climbs it does a thing the previous hundred kilometres had not prepared the rider for. It shuts the view. The open heath of the massif, the bruyère and the long sightlines that the Suc au May had paid out that morning with such generosity, give way over the space of a few kilometres to plantation: to the dark, ordered, shadeless ranks of Douglas fir and sitka spruce that now cover so much of the southern apron of the Plateau de Millevaches. One climbs up into the trees, and a country that has been wide all day becomes a corridor.

What is underneath has not changed at all, and that, I confess, is the part I find genuinely worth pausing on. The rock here is the same leucogranite the riders have been crossing since they entered the Monédières, pale and coarse and old beyond easy reckoning, the basement of the whole Limousin upland. The ground is continuous; only the skin of it has changed, and changed recently, and changed by us. The conifers are not native. They are the work of the twentieth century, of a deliberate planting that put fast softwood on the poorer pastures and the abandoned commons, and which the geographers of the Plateau call, with a precision the English language rather envies, the fermeture paysagère: the closing of the landscape.¹ Where the heights once showed, in the local phrase, large cleared horizons, they now show timber in rows. I am not sure I have ever seen the hand of a single century lie so plainly on a place, nor lie so lightly over rock so indifferent to it.

The planting and the emptying were, as it happens, the same movement. The Plateau was one of the most thinly peopled corners of France before ever the trees came, and from the end of the Second World War it emptied further, in the long rural exodus that took the young off the granite and into the towns; and as the people left, the conifer arrived to take their ground. The instrument was the Fonds forestier national, set up in 1946 to put a war-stripped France back into timber, which paid for the planting of softwood on poor and abandoned land at a scale that redrew the map. Forest cover on the Plateau, which had stood at something like a quarter in 1946, was nearing a half by 1971, and some forty-five thousand hectares of new forest went onto the Plateau de Millevaches in the forty years after the war.² A good deal of it was planted by heirs who had themselves gone to the cities, and who found in spruce a way of holding land they had stopped living on.

Madranges itself the rider scarcely sees. The bourg sits some sixty-five metres off the road at about kilometre one hundred and thirteen, a cluster too small and too quickly passed to register at racing speed, and small by any honest measure: a commune of a hundred and sixty-six souls at the last counting, and fewer at the next, the population having fallen by something near a seventh in the six years to 2023. It is a gateway commune of the Plateau, inside the perimeter of the regional park, and all its water, like the descent that carried the riders down here, is already running to the Vézère, the river the next segment delivers the race to at Treignac. I own a weakness, which I do not propose to defend at length, for places of exactly this size: places whose whole civic history can be held in one hand, and where a single fact will carry the weight that a city has to distribute across a thousand.

And Madranges has its fact. The one that has stayed with me is that this isolated upland village, Catholic for the whole of its recorded life, turned Protestant at the very end of the nineteenth century. The new faith arrived in 1898; a reformed temple was built and inaugurated in March 1900, to the design of Adolphe Augustin Rey, then a young architect of churches and eclectic buildings, and later, after he had given up building for the study of it, one of the early figures of social housing in Paris and a tireless propagandist of what he named the healthful or climatic dwelling.³ One should not make too much of a single small building. But it is a genuinely odd and rather moving thing, that a hamlet of a few hundred on the granite should petition a pastor from Brive and raise a temple of the reformed religion a full century after the Revolution had unsettled the old one, and a generation after the young Republic had begun, in earnest, to quarrel with the Church. The temple still stands. It stands, moreover, a short walk from the older set-piece of the village, the Église Saint-Barthélemy, which is listed on the national inventory and which had the place to itself for several hundred years before it acquired a neighbour of another confession. Two faiths, two buildings, a few hundred parishioners to be divided between them: it is a sum that only a very small place can set out so plainly.

Our own four riders are walking this route a couple of kilometres at a time, and keeping the honest ledger of it that this blog exists to keep, and most of their kilometres are walked through country quite as enclosed as the plantation above Madranges, though enclosed for duller reasons: hedge and fence and house, the suburban corridor that pays out its sightlines as grudgingly as any stand of sitka. The comparison is mine and not theirs, and I make it only because the resemblance pleases me: the small daily instalment going on through closed ground toward an opening that has been promised and is not yet in view.

For the opening is coming. The road that has shut the view for the length of this segment will, in the next, give it back all at once: the plantation breaks, the ground falls away toward the gorges of the Vézère, and the medieval town of Treignac stands up out of the valley to be looked at. That, however, is the next essay's business, and Treignac a subject of its own, granite and water both. The segment that ends here ends in the trees, on rock that has not altered in the time it takes mountains to rise and wear flat, under a cover that has not stood there a hundred years, on the way down to a river it cannot yet hear. It is the quietest stretch of the whole day. And quiet, I have long held, is not the same thing as empty.

Sources

• Madranges commune: population, the streams Boulou and Madrange as tributaries of the Vézère, the arrival of Protestantism and the temple, and the Église Saint-Barthélemy: Madranges, Wikipédia.
• The afforestation of the Plateau de Millevaches and the fermeture paysagère: Plateau de Millevaches, Wikipédia.
• The post-war enrésinement, the Fonds forestier national, and the forest-cover figures: L'enrésinement du Plateau de Millevaches de 1945 aux années 80 (Faux la Montagne); Histoire de la forêt du Plateau (Journal IPNS).
• Adolphe Augustin Rey, architect of the temple: Adolphe Augustin Rey, Wikipédia.

Pair-written by Justin Simpson and Claude Opus 4.8. Voice register: saintsbury-modern (registers-framework).