The Empty Highland

Segment twenty crosses no town and tops no categorised climb. This blog keeps a town and a climb for almost every segment of the stage; for these six kilometres, from kilometre one hundred and thirty-four to kilometre one hundred and forty, both fields stand empty, and the emptiness is accurate. The road runs north-east out of the high ground above Lestards and into the interior of the Plateau de Millevaches, and there is, in the ordinary sense, nothing to see. The Plateau makes that into a subject.

And then there is the name. Millevaches looks like the easiest word in the Corrèze to translate and is among the hardest.¹ The obvious modern reading, mille vaches, a thousand cows, is almost certainly the wrong one. The scholars who have worked on it longest read the first part as a Gaulish word for a height and the second as a Latin word for empty or abandoned: not a thousand cows but the empty highland, half Gaulish and half Latin, a name for a place that is mostly neither. Other readings hear mille sources, the thousand springs the tourist office prefers, or the granite boulders themselves, scattered across the heath and grouped, to a medieval eye, like herds of stone cattle. Empty highland, thousand springs, herds of stone: every one of them is true of what the rider is looking at. The thousand living cows are the only reading the land refuses.

Under all the names the land is granite. The Plateau is the raised top of one of the largest granite massifs in the Massif Central, a body forced up during the long collision that closed the Paleozoic, then worn flat and tilted gently to the north-west, so that the middle of it reads as a high table while the rivers do their cutting at the edges. The Vézère gorge the race crossed at Treignac, two segments back, is one of those edge-cuts. The granite is also why the ground is wet: rain that cannot drain through the rock gathers in shallow basins, and in those basins, since the last ice withdrew, peat has been building under the heath. The bogs of the Plateau sit, quite literally, in bowls of stone, and a rider crossing a little above seven hundred metres is riding the roof of a rock that holds water like a saucer.

The dark walls of conifer that shut off the view for much of the segment look like the oldest thing in it and are among the youngest. Before the war the Plateau was open country, a near-treeless moor of heath and rough pasture. After the war the state paid to plant, fast and exotic, Douglas fir and Sitka spruce and grand fir in even-aged blocks across tens of thousands of hectares of emptied farmland, within a couple of generations. French has a phrase for what this did to the horizon, fermeture paysagère, the closing of the landscape,² the open distance walled in by timber. The great storms of December nineteen ninety-nine flattened whole rectangles of the young monoculture at a stroke and showed how shallow its roots, in both senses, went. It is worth knowing, on a stretch that feels like wilderness, that much of the wild was planted, as an investment, within living memory. The forester who did most to map these plantations, Marius Vazeilles, was also a self-taught archaeologist who pulled a Gallo-Roman ruin out of the heath while surveying for trees: the modern forest and the buried Roman past, found by the same hands.

The emptiness is lived as well as seen. The communes here count their people in dozens; a commune near this road, Toy-Viam, is the smallest in the whole Limousin, with something like thirty-five inhabitants, and the densities run to a handful of souls to the square kilometre. And yet the Plateau has not been left to its silence. From the nineteen-seventies it drew settlers who came on purpose, people who left the cities for the first real emptiness they reached, took up farms and crafts, defended the open landscape against the advancing conifer, and have argued about the place, in their own newspaper, ever since. Not many uplands this empty are this deliberately inhabited.

They have also written it, more thoroughly than almost any comparable ground in France. Richard Millet was born in nineteen fifty-three at Viam, a commune on the Plateau a short way off this road, and built his fiction on one invented village, Siom, which is the Plateau under another name; critics reach for Hardy's Wessex and Faulkner's county to say what the place does in his books.³ Pierre Bergounioux, raised down in Brive, reads the same granite the other way, as something austere and sombre, a hard northern country set against a softer south.⁴ And the oldest voice is the land's own: Marcelle Delpastre, a working farmer from just off the western edge of this plateau, became one of the great Occitan writers of the last century by setting the disappearing peasant Limousin down in its own language.⁵ The music that goes with her verse is the chabrette, the Limousin bagpipe set with small mirrors, nearly lost and pulled back from the edge by a few players in the late nineteen-eighties. An empty highland, it turns out, is a crowded place to be from.

The four of us keeping the walking ledger for this blog are covering the opposite kind of ground. Our two kilometres a day go down streets nobody has named a region after, past nothing anyone has set a novel in, and the daily cap holds whether the walk is worth describing or not. There is a rough justice in spending the back half of the route on one of the most written-about empty places in France while logging the least written-about full ones. All four of us are well past the midpoint of our own hundred and eighty-five kilometres now, and bunched within a kilometre or two of one another, which is its own kind of flat country.

The road tips up a little toward the end of the segment, gathering itself for the town the next one finally enters, and at that point the names start coming back. For these six kilometres, though, there is only the highland with its three true names and its one false one, the planted dark along the skyline, the water waiting in the granite, and a rider crossing the middle of the day on the quietest road of it. The Plateau does not perform for the people passing over it. That, in the end, is most of what a thousand years of them have climbed up here to find.

Sources

• The Plateau de Millevaches: the contested etymology, the heath and peat bogs, the postwar fermeture paysagère, and the long depopulation: Plateau de Millevaches – Wikipédia.
• The regional park, its otter emblem, and the eleven rivers over fifty kilometres that rise on or around the Plateau, the "water tower" of central France: Parc naturel régional de Millevaches en Limousin – Wikipédia.
• The Millevaches granite, a Variscan leucogranite batholith among the largest in the Massif Central, raised and planed flat: Granites du Millevaches (thèse, HAL).
• The scale and critique of the Fonds Forestier National afforestation of the uplands: Forestopic.
• Richard Millet and the Siom cycle: Richard Millet – Wikipedia.
• Pierre Bergounioux's darker reading of the Plateau: Pierre Bergounioux – Wikipédia.
• Marcelle Delpastre, Occitan poet and ethnographer of the Limousin: Marcelle Delpastre – Wikipedia.
• The chabrette, the mirror-set Limousin bagpipe, and its late-1980s revival: Chabrette – Wikipedia; Musique limousine – Wikipédia.

Pair-written by Justin Simpson and Claude Opus 4.8. Voice register: madrid-review.