Mas Oller, wine-making as it's been done for centuries ...

Yesterday we went for a tipple at the winery down the road.

Here in beautiful Catalonia they have some very delicious wines, and nowhere more so than at the friendly little winery of Mas Oller, just outside Pals.

I should say, by way of explanation that a mas or masia is a typical Catalan farmhouse. It was usually built from local stone, had at least two stories, with the ground floor given over to livestock or working space for the business of the farm. The family normally lived on the first floor, and if there was a second floor that would traditionally have been used as a granary or a pigeon loft. Most of these houses were built to face south or south east, to take shelter from the Tramontana, the dominant wind that blows down from the north.

Empordà, this lovely corner of Catalonia in which we live, has a long history of wine-making as it happens. It all goes way back to its days as a Greek colony. Way back in about 600 B.C. those old Greek overlords first decided to try their hands at growing some grapes in the rich, local soil. The result was an astounding success. Before long this little corner of Catalonia was renowned for the quality of its wines, and they've been going strong ever since.

At Mas Oller, the old farm house, dating back to the 18th century, stands between the mountains and the sea. They've produced many crops on the estate over the years, but when it was rescued by its present owner, the renowned winemaker, Carlos Esteva, it was pretty much on its knees. The old house and outbuildings were falling apart, and had Carlos not come along when he did there's a reasonable chance that they'd have passed the point of no return, and been lost forever. 

There were a few vines growing across the holding, but the local council insisted that, before Carlos turned his attention to what he does best, and set about growing some prize-winning wines, he focus on the farm buildings and restore them so that they could be saved for future generations.

And that's exactly what he did. 

Today the old masia and the outbuildings are restored to their former glory, their thick walls providing cool in the heat of the Catalan summer and warmth in the depths of its winters when the Tramontana blows harshly from the North.

The old cow shed has been converted into a cellar, and the vines have been replanted in what had once been the best wine-producing estate in Pals.

French oak barrels in which the wine matures

And out in the fields they're growing Syrah, Grenache and Cabernet Sauvignon grapes to make their red wines ...

... and Picapoll and Mavasía de Sitges for their white wine. 

We had a leisurely stroll amongst the vines, and our guide explained that 2014 had been a bit of a strange year. The summer had been colder and wetter than normal, with the result that the grapes are not ripening as they usually would. It's going to mean that the harvest will be later than normal, but, who knows, perhaps the exceptional conditions will produce a vintage of exceptional quality. 

They showed us all their state-of-the-art machinery for cleaning, and mashing and fermenting the grapes after they've been picked.

The white grapes are picked and processed first. And then a few weeks' later they move on to the red.

And finally we went to the bodega to sample the three wines that they produced last year at Mas Oller.

First up was the Mar, a very stylish white that was fruity on the nose, but lighter and drier on the palate with notes of citrus. Then we had the Pur, which had a lovely toffee, vanilla nose, but was light and soft on the palate. And last we had the Plus, which was much less aromatic on the nose and drier with more tannins on the palette. All three were delicious, but both Mr B and I preferred the Pur.

Part of the space in the old cow shed has been given over to a collection of modern art, which contrasts nicely with the timelessness of the solid old walls and the barrel-vaulted ceiling.

If you're in the area and you fancy taking a look at a traditional winery do drop in and have a look around. They're open most days from noon until 6:00 p.m. local time, and are happy to give you a tour. You can find their website here: Mas Oller

All the best for now,

Bonny x

And if you're in the Empordá area why not check out Peretellada ... the village that time forgot

Or Sant Feliu de Guíxols mi pueblo

Or S'Agaró ... the pueblo down the road 

Le Pont du Gard, Remoulins, France ... by daylight

So here it is: I give you the Pont du Gard in daylight. Isn't it a splendid sight? This is the highest aqueduct that those wily old Romans ever got around to building. It's part of a 50 kilometre water canal that took fresh water from a spring in Uzès to feed the fountains, baths and gardens of Nîmes, which was then a flourishing Roman city. The water ran in an aqueduct supported by the top row of arches. The people went down below on a passageway supported by the first level of arches.

Just think: this stone colossus was the greatest bridge ever constructed in the Classical Age. Built in 50 AD on 3 levels, it's 360 metres (393 yards) long and stands 50 metres (54 yards) high.

It was built in a breath-taking 5 years. And what is even more amazing is that they didn't use any cement. The bricks were cut with laser-precision to sit neatly on top of one another, locking at critical points, and they have stood the test of time for two millennia. 

Look very carefully at the bricks in the photo below. They're from one of the middle arches of the bridge. See how the original builders have numbered the stones - in Roman numerals, of course. The stones were cut to size in the quarry, so that they all fitted together to make the arch, and then carried to the site to be put together in a sort of flat-pack, pre-fab process. Happily for the oxen pulling the carts the Quarry of Estel, from which the blocks were cut, was a mere 400 metres away from the bridge. The quarry was lost to us for many years, having been buried in some 4 metres of mud from successive floods, but they rediscovered the cutting face during an archeological dig back in 1998.

Just look at how beautifully those old stones sit together so that it's impossible to push even a leaf of paper between them. And look at the texture of the stones that have been cut to shape by hand using nothing more sophisticated than a hammer and chisel. 

Normally the Gardon is a quiet, well-behaved river, but from time to time when the snow melts in springtime, or when there's torrential rain upriver, the water level rises dramatically and it turns into a violent, surging torrent. To survive the very worst of these Gardonades the pillars are solidly built on the rocks on the riverbed and shaped like the prows of ships to offer minimum resistance to the water flowing past. The rock from which the bridge is built is a highly resistant limestone with a high shell content. The Romans maximised its resistant properties by mining enormous blocks from the quarry weighing 6 or 7 tonnes each, which form an extremely resistant mass of rock when stacked together.

Given the scale of this bridge, and the large span of it arches, the Romans employed a technique not frequently used in the Classical World. Each separate arch is a composite of three independent arches, which have been assembled separately, and then joined using locking stones. You can see the three distinct arches in the span of the arch shown below.

I was really taken aback by all the graffiti that has been engraved into the stones over the years. 

Thankfully people have, for the most part, given up on the idea of scoring their initials and the date of their visit into the stones, but I was fascinated by the inscriptions made by the Compagnons du Tour de France. The Compagnons are still alive and flourishing in France, but their roots go back to medieval times. They are artisans and craftsmen who are apprenticed within the Compagnonnage, a kind of super trade guild with its own constitution and secret rites of initiation and codewords. As part of their apprenticeship they spend a year travelling around France to learn through visits to sites where great examples of their craft are to be found. Many of them came to see the bridge, which was recognised as a feat of stone architecture, and they left their initials with drawings of the tools of their trade as a salute to the brilliance of the Roman craftsmen responsible for building it. In the photos below there are a number of stone masons' axes proudly on display.

They tell me that more than 320 initials of Compagnons have been engraved on the bridge. The earliest dates from 1611, and the most recent from 1989. The earliest I found dated from 1767 (bottom right in the collection above). 

No one knows the name of the original Roman architect who designed the bridge, but there is an old Provençal legend that claims it was the Devil himself ... .

You see in the old days, before the bridge was built, it was mighty difficult to get across the river. In particular in the springtime, when the melt waters stormed down to the sea, the placid river became a raging torrent.

And crossing from the rive gauche to the rive droite became a death-defying mission. The people thereabouts were in the habit of wading across where the rocks rose higher and they could keep a steady footing. Few of them had ever learnt to swim. And even if they had, the strongest man would find himself overcome by the surge of the seething river when it was in flood.

Lives were lost, animals perished and the local people, who normally lived peacefully along the banks of the Gardon felt powerless in the face of nature.

Now as it happens a renowned stone mason lived in a little hamlet not far from where the Pont du Gard stands today. Every spring the people would come to him and say: Why don't you build us a bridge across the river, and put an end to all this death and destruction?

It seemed like an impossible task, given the steepness of the banks and the width of the gorge, but the stone mason was a very proud man. He'd spent many years apprenticed to a master mason after which he'd journeyed far and wide across the land perfecting his craft. Eventually his pride in his accomplishments got the better of him and he agreed to accept the commission. He reckoned he'd build a bridge and become the hero of the gorge by saving the people thereabouts from the ravages of the flood waters.

But sometimes what starts out as a straightforward plan has a way of getting painfully complicated. The local people worked hard to supply the stone mason with stones to build the bridge. They all ganged together and worked day and night to construct pillars of stone in the river, which they planned to span with a viaduct.

But before they could finish the work a terrible storm forced them to take shelter in their homes. For three days and three nights a tempest blew, the rain poured and thunder crashed along the valley of the Gardon. Inside their homes the people shivered, suspecting there were evil forces afoot. On the fourth morning, when the elements had calmed down sufficiently, they returned to the river only to find that the force of the water had washed away every last stone of the pillars they had built.

Disheartened, but not defeated, they began from scratch again. Take care, they said to the stone mason. Make sure that the foundations for the pillars are as strong as we can make them this time.

The stone mason felt chastened. Were they criticising his work? How dare they! He vowed that the next set of pillars would withstand the very worst the river could throw at them. He'd build them twice as big and twice as strong. Everyone went to work again, and slowly, slowly massive pillars of stone rose out of the river that were mightier than any that ever been built.

But, as before, a winter storm came and the people fled to their homes as the thunder crashed and the lightening flashed up and down the valley of the Gardon. And next morning, when the people braved the river banks they found that all their work had been washed away like matchsticks on a neap tide.

This time they turned on the stone mason and accused him of not having designed the pillars properly. You held yourself out as the greatest architect of stones, and look how all your fancy learning has been swept away as nothing by the river,  they said. We ought never to have been taken in by you and your false promises spoken with empty, silken words. 

Defeated and dejected in the face of all the criticism the stone mason sat alone by the bank of the river with his head in his hands regretting the day that he had ever boasted of his accomplishments, and thinking dark, suicidal thoughts.

Why, I would give my very soul to the Devil to be finished with this wretched bridge, he said aloud in his despair.

And then in a flash of sulphurous smoke a sinister-looking, horned creature, half man, half beast, stood before him. Its red eyes surveyed him knowingly as it impatiently pawed the earth with a cloven hoof.

For the price of a single soul I could build the bridge for you, if you wanted, the creature said, lisping as though its tongue were deformed. And what's more I could build it so that it would stand until the end of time and never be destroyed by the Gardon.

Really? the stone mason said, regretting for a moment that he'd wagered his soul for the bridge.

Yes, the creature replied knowingly, as though sensing his hesitation. But it need not be your soul. I could take the soul of the first to cross the bridge after it was completed.

Very well. It's a deal, the stone mason replied, feeling relief to have been reprieved his own soul, but also feeling a terrible sense of guilt that he might have paid with the soul of one of his neighbours instead.

You go home and leave me to it, the creature said. When you come back in the morning the greatest bridge the world has ever seen will span this gorge.

The stone mason went home with a heavy heart, and told his wife all that had taken place.

Well it need not cost as much as a human soul, the good woman replied. One of the hunting dogs came home with a hare in its mouth. Curiously it was still alive. Why don't we take the hare to the river at first light, and release it to cross the bridge before any of our neighbours go abroad?

The man agreed, and went to bed feeling relief that the bridge might be built without the forfeit of a human soul. All through the night the earth shook as the Devil carved out huge rocks of stone with his horns and his nails. The man trembled with fear at the ungodly power he had unleashed in the valley.

The next morning, as dawn broke, the stone mason and his wife hurried to the bank of the Gardon with the hare carefully wrapped in a knapsack. As the church bells rang out Lauds, summoning the faithful to morning prayers they released the hare to run across the bridge. The Devil stood at the other side ready to receive his payment, but when he saw that it was only a hare he swore a vile curse and hurled the animal at the wall of the bridge. As the sacred bells of the morning office were still ringing across the valley there was nothing that the evil one could do. The bargain had been made and fulfilled on both sides, and he was forced to flee the scene. But from time to time, however, his anger spills over in the wrath of a Gardonade, and the flood waters hurl his fury at the solid pillars of the bridge that was predestined by him to endure until the end of time.

It is said that you can still see the imprint of the hare beneath one of the upper arches of the bridge. Being very short-sighted I was unable to see it, even using the lens of my camera as a telescope.

Other people say that the supposed outline of a hare is, in fact, a Roman phallus, which the original bridge builders marked on their work to ward off the evil eye.

Whatever the way of it, the bridge is an amazing structure that must surely have inspired awe and led ordinary mortals to believe that it could only ever have been completed with some manner of supernatural intervention.

All the best,


Bonny x

As shared on Our World Tuesday and the Alphabet Project


And if you happen to pass this way by night check out its nocturnal light-show here: Pont du Gard at night.

Or not-very-far-away Perpignan

Or Micropolis

Pont du Gard, Remoulins, France ... at night

Don't you just love it when a plan comes together? Mr B asked me to organise an overnight stop somewhere in France on our way home to Spain. It was a great brief - anywhere, I mean anywhere interesting in France. Well the sky's the limit ... .

And it totally was. The sky was the limit with this leviathan of the Roman world. Feast your eyes, my friends, on the tallest aqueduct that Rome ever built.

Twilight at the Pont du Gard, Remoulins, France

Isn't it a beauty? Way up on top, where it looks like someone sewed on the top tier using blanket stitch, they used to carry the water across the valley to feed the growing Roman colony in Nîmes. Down below where you can see the wider arches they had a viaduct where people would travel across the river gorge with the Gardon river flowing merrily on its way down below.

Mr B thought that it was a pretty good choice.

We arrived in Remoulins in the early evening, and checked in with our (dog-friendly) hotel in the centre of town. Then we decided to take Maxi, the wonder dog, for a walk to stretch his paws after all that time sitting in the back of the car watching Scooby-Doo videos with Emi, who was also looking slightly goggle-eyed in the way that eight year old boys do when they've just spent eight hours watching non-stop Scooby-Doo on a small screen in the back of a fast moving car.

As we had a UNESCO world heritage site on the outskirts of town that seemed like the obvious destination to bend our steps towards. We asked the chap in the hotel reception, and he gave us one of those Gallic shrugs and told us that it would take tventy minoots to get to the bridge.

About an hour later we ambled up to the bridge, hungry and wondering how we'd ever manage to drag our weary backsides back to town without some pommes frites and a nice glass of something cold and wet.

Then we saw this:

... and forgot about the pommes frites.

We wandered around admiring it and wading into the river to get the best possible photo. And then we wondered whether or not they'd have some sort of son et lumière gig later when it got properly dark.

It got properly dark.

And the lights came on ... and I felt a bit inadequate at having come without my tripod ...

Taking photos in the pitch dark, half way across the river was a challenge. Not least because my anxious son would shout out my name every five minutes from the viewing terrace to reassure himself that I hadn't been swept away by the water. Every time I released the shutter I had to shout back reassurance that I was still very much in the land of the living, resulting in a blur as my exhalation shook the camera ever so slightly. And, with the lights dancing in waves of colour, it took very little to blur the image.

And then we climbed the bridge and walked across it with the lights playing around us. It was a moonless night, which made the colours all the more dramatic given the contrast they made with the inky blackness of the sky.

Emi's new word for the evening was serendipitous: adjective: occurring or discovered by chance in a happy and beneficial way. Our discovery of the night-time spectacle had been a truly serendipitous gift of fate, and our good luck didn't end there. You see, by now, we had really worked up an appetite and the idea of a nice steak-frites was weighing very heavily on our thoughts.

Just as the happy holiday mood was in danger of being deflated by hunger pangs we saw this place, Les Terrasses, on the rive droite of the Gardon.

Now we would normally run a mile from the only restaurant operating at a tourist hotspot like this, dismissing it as something that only survived because it held the foreign tourists to ransom being the only pit-stop in town. But we were very hungry and it was a long walk back into town (merci, Monsieur le concierge for your advice on that point). So we decided to give it a go. And it was really great. They offered us a bowl of water for le petit chien, which immediately earned them multiple brownie points chez moi, and with very little fuss and fanfare they delivered succulent rib eye steaks in a pepper sauce with pommes frites and some lovely ice-cold glasses of the local beer. Fantastique! Formidable!

And the best bit was the magnificent view from the terrace where we sat feasting in the balmy night air:

Apologies, but the glass of the fine local beer did very little to steady my hand on the camera ... .

So, if you happen to be in the neighbourhood of Remoulins and you'd like to go for a stroll, head for the rive droite, the right bank of the Gardon, walking out of town. It's much closer than the left bank, and don't be afraid to try, Les Terrasses, the terrace restaurant when you get there. It's not half bad!

Anyway, drop by tomorrow, and I'll show you what this baby looks like in daylight.

À demain,


Bonny x

Or if you're in the area why not check out Perpignan?

Or the insect kingdom of Micropolis?

Lulworth Crumple, Stair Hole, Lulworth Cove and then on to Durdle Door

Following our visit to Corfe Castle and lunch at the Scott Arms we headed off to Lulworth to see the cove and the crumple. Now this sort of thing is just so interesting. It's kind of like having a geology lesson that you can walk through. And it's not just me: more school children come to Lulworth on geography field trips than go to any other corner of the country.

So what's the Lulworth Crumple, you ask?

Well, here it is. This magnificent cliff face with the layers of rock all playing off at jaunty angles to the horizontal is the Lulworth Crumple.

Lulworth Crumple and Stair Hole

The rocks here are sedimentary, and, as you might expect, they once lay in nice, neat, horizontal layers made up of hard limestone alternating with soft mudstone.

The Crumple was produced when the tectonic plates carrying Europe and Africa crashed into one another about 65 million years ago. The force of the impact folded up parts of the land to form the Alps and the Pyrenees after a fashion that was not totally dissimilar to the way in which a car hood - or bonnet, as we like to call them in England - will bend in a head-on collision.

Shock waves spread out across the plates, like ripples in a pond, pushing up smaller hills like the chalk ridges in Purbeck. As the layers of rock at the Crumple were pushed against each other under the impact of those shock waves they bent so that some of the originally horizontal layers are now almost vertical, but the different types of rock performed differently under the huge pressures to which they were subjected. The hard limestone bent and cracked, but remained largely intact. Gravity caused the soft mudstone to slide between the harder layers of limestone to fill any spaces produced where it had bent. In this way the amazing folds that are the Lulworth Crumple were formed.

Lulworth Crumple and Stair Hole

Stair Hole is the big hole in the spine of hard Portland limestone that faces out to sea. It's been formed by sea erosion of a weakness in the rock, which is slowly, slowly producing a circular sea cove behind it that will one day, in the distant future look like Lulworth Cove, just over the other side of the headland. In fact it will probably merge with Lulworth Cove as a result of continued coastal erosion.

Would you like to see the famous Lulworth Cove?

Here it is:

Lulworth Cove, Dorset

It's a perfect, almost fully circular, cove. It was formed where a river, swollen with melt water at the end of the ice age wore its way down through the hard, almost vertical rock strata of Portland limestone, directly in front of the sea. Behind this hard rock were bands of much softer rocks backed by a harder band of chalk (which you can see, rising up from the beach). As a result when the channel, which had been opened up by that old river, was exposed to the ebb and flow of the sea, the soft rocks between the limestone and the chalk were eroded much more rapidly than the hard rocks in front, or the chalk behind. Diffraction of the sea waves as they bunched together to pass through the narrow opening at the mouth of the cove and then spread out afterwards caused the circular erosion. If you look carefully at the photos you can just about see the circular wave forms resulting from this diffraction.

Lulworth Cove, Dorset

And you can still see the remains of that big old river that caused the whole thing to develop in the first place. These days it's more of a fast-flowing stream, but it runs down past the beach café where they sell teas and ice cream to the tourists.

The entrance to Lulworth Cove, Dorset

And then we drove off round the coast a little further to see the wonders that are Durdle Door and the Man O'War Rocks, which are to be found in the cove to the east of Durdle Door.

You can see the Man O'War Rocks in the photo below. A very, very long time ago the cove here looked a lot like Lulworth Cove, but sea erosion eventually wore away the spine of hard limestone that faced out to sea, and the Man O'War Rocks are all that remains of that old limestone spine. Look carefully ... you can still see the large hole in the centre, through which the sea entered and which caused the wave diffraction that produced the circular cove. And if you look even more carefully you can see how the waves are still diffracting through that opening to come out rounded. There's a bit of interference with waves coming through the other openings, but the diffraction is still pretty clear.

Man O'War Rocks, Dorset

Anyway, on over the headland is the famous Durdle Door, formed by sea erosion of a weakness in the limestone spine that faced out to sea.

Isn't it amazing?

When we were there a multitude of people were dressed in wet suits to swim through the arch. Others were climbing up the outer pillar and jumping into the sea. Can you see one of them, brave soul, in the photo below?

Emi thought that was the very coolest thing he'd seen anyone do in ages. And I prayed quietly that he'd forget about it, and not want to repeat the trick himself any time soon ... .

If you'd like to visit I'd advise you to wear strong shoes. You can easily walk down the steps to the Man O'War beach, but you have to climb down the cliff to get to the Durdle Door beach, and it's a bit of a scramble.

Access to Durdle Door Beach, Dorset

All the best,

Bonny x

And if you're down in this neck of the woods why not visit some other cool Dorset delights? There's:

Corfe Castle (just down the road)

The Scott Arms (great tucker and a view to die for)

Or, for something completely different, the Tank Museum, Bovington, which isn't very far away either.