A change of focus... a change of name...

Touraine Flint has changed its name and header...
it is now...

Following Others' Footsteps.

The change came about when we realised that there is so much history to this area...
and, for us particularly, that of La Forge itself and its environs...
that Touraine Flint was a "bloggers handicap"...
especially that Flint word.

When we arrived here, one of the first things we found....
carefully preserved in a tin box...
probably a biscuit tin...
were the last milking records....

Sad reading to watch the production tail off...

Whilst cleaning up the old fireplace in the longère, we found a strip of paper...from 1915... a strip of newspaper...
that had been rolled up and used as a Rawlplug...
Pauline has spent hours deciphering the wording....

One side of the clipping. When we did the scan we got the two smaller pieces back to front.

Second part of the clipping

We have been looking at the old cadastral maps....
and made interesting discoveries about the buildings that are here now....
and the ones that aren't...
the ones on the other side of the bief...
and the layout of the bocage field system in the pré...

Cadastre Napoléonien 1812  - extract, Moulin de la Forge and Bezuard

The millstream - le bief - existed in its present form in 1812. So...
when did the forge come into use?
When did it stop? And why?
What was made here?
When did it become a farm?

All that remains of the forge is some piles of slag (scorie or laitier) like this

And there are things yet to discover about the longère...
we know that it was a set of three buildings...
possibly four...
some very old...
and they and the barn were no longer in use when the forge was running in 1812...
judging by some of the older timbers in the longère, there was no roof.

The loft - le grenier - above the Long Room has a rendered wall, which is weathered just like the barn.

Possible building sequence from C11th...
click on picture to decipher!
Thanks to remnants found during re-tiling,
we know that the "magenta" building
had a pyramidal roof.

And, whilst we find used bits of flint...
almost every day we work on the land...
that Flint word was blocking our brains....
and any posts...
decent pictures of flint are hard to take.

We get fossils, too...
like the little cluster found only yesterday...
a fossil that links straight to the present day...
because the species still exists!

All things that need somewhere to be written about...
that didn't quite fit under the original header!