Les Palets de Gargantua

Apologies for the lack of previous entries over the past months!

The weekend of 14th-15th September was the opportunity for organisations large and small all over France to display the nation's lesser-known heritage under the Journées Européennes du Patrimoine scheme. This is no thanks to the dreadful national website, or the Centre region booklet which contrived to omit everything in the canton of Ligueil! Having friends who live in Charnizay own up to never having visited their local dolmen (you know who you are), the excellent leaflet for Touraine du Sud brought this megalithic monument to our attention. There was to be a visite commentée - a guided tour.

Accompanied by our friend Joan, we followed the signs from Charnizay along the road to Obterre and were finally guided to an enclosure along a stretch of track where we could see other cars parked. In the midst of a rolling lawn surrounded by trees there is a massive assembly of stone, believed to date from the early Neolithic period about 5000 years ago. It is the work of people who had no iron tools, no tractor-driven diggers, just flint and antler picks. The capstone is 6 metres by 4.2 metres and weighs 50 tonnes, an almost incredible feat of the human spirit..

The guided visit under way

A dolmen is a funerary monument - a stone tomb - and there are several more in the vicinity,  and across Europe as far away as Britain. They may be a family or tribal tomb as there is often one principal burial and several lesser ones. Les Palets de Gargantua consists of three huge pieces of stone, and there is much speculation as to whether it was never finished, or if there were once more stones that were later removed for reuse. There has never been any real excavation to find out, although Time Team fans will immediately think of non-invasive methods of finding out what lies under the ground.

The Palets de Gargantua

Our guide, from the Association "Charnizay, son passé et la Nouvelle-France", described the way the stone would have been cut in a local quarry, and three possible theories as to how it was transported to the chosen spot  - on rollers, on mud, or on frozen ground. Her own house a few metres away was constructed from the same rock, which is pudding stone, known to French geologists as poudingue. It is a rather handsome stone made up of lumps of reddish flint in a grey-blue matrix, and very hard. Our Neolithic ancestors built to last!

The interpretative board... the information can be read if you click on the picture...

The name originates with the giant Gargantua, who is a character from the works of Rabelais. A palet is a quoit, a throwing toy. One legend is that Gargantua's wife carried the quoits in her apron to the Champ de l'Ormeau (ou de l'Humeau) where Les Palets de Gargantua now stands. Alternatively, Gargantua himself threw the quoits, from Charnizay or from Bossay-sur-Claise. Gargantua amused himself by hurling the quoits at his target which was the menhir (standing stone) at Draché according to some, or the dolmen at Civray-sur-Esvres according to others.

The site is beautifully presented, with a brand new interpretive board and for the day a display of the publications of the Association under a neat awning. It would make a good picnic spot - there are picnic tables for that purpose! The sheer size of the dolmen was overwhelming, but there is a sense of great peace.

Some old fossils have just been discovered...

Just a bit of fun....
Some friends of ours, Biscuithead & the Biscuit Badgers have just released their latest video on the interweb ahead of their promotional launch....

It is a very well worked cartoon film with a touch of the Terry Gilliams about it...
and their musical style has close links to those of Neil Innes and Viv Stannishall and the Bonzos.

The link under the picture will take you to their Home page and the video.

Dinosaurs by Biscuithead & the Biscuit Badgers

The lead singer Dean is a quiet, unassuming allotmenteer with a very eclectic plot...
in fact, on the page that the link takes you to...
as well as the video of Dinosaurs...
there are the tracks of their second album "The Greatest Show on Toast" available to listen and/or buy.

Listen to "The Allotment Gavotte"... dedicated to our annual allotment show.

And on their first album, "Interspecies Disco" [listenable tracks are found on the CDs page] is a treatise on the treatment of "Flea Beetles"...

But let him loose on stage.... that's a different story....

Dean... the musical magician!

if you get a chance to see them live, please do!

Comparaison d'outils préhistoire et aujourd'hui

Apologies for such a long time between posts this year, but we've been very tied up with other things,  like Aigronne Valley Wildlife, however...

We spent a fascinating evening a long year ago at Le Panier d'Alice in La Celle Guenand, at a réunion organised by the Association Nomade "Le Champ des Livres". The president of the Friends of the Grand Pressigny Château Museum, Mr. Michel Geslin, brought a sample of his personal collection of prehistoric stone tools, many of them collected by his grandfather, along with a box of modern tools and devices, and he invited those present to match the old with the new. It has led us to become Amis de la Museé ourselves.

M.Geslin is holding a 'chunk' of fossil wood that someone brought along.

One thing we found astonishing was the sophistication and degree of specialisation among the stone tools. A burin, or point for reaming bone or leather, was carefully faceted, with the result that the point was strengthened, thus prolonging the life of the tool. The modern equivalent was a steel point which a panelbeater would use to make hand-built bodywork (for example, for a Morgan sports car). The modern tool and the old were exactly the same, except for the material from which they were made.

The coffee grinder and the mill wheel dressing hammer are 'together'...
from time to time the quern and its tool needed to be re-dressed...
the tool for that is under the coffee grinder handle.

The hammer here is similar to the first post on this blog... the similarity of these tools is wonderful.

The missing picture... the 'lighter' is the best in my opinion!

In the first picture... the stone sphere, smooth and polished, was used for grinding grain, and another stone sphere, with a knobbly surface, was used to roughen the surface of the millstones and the grinder once they became too smooth.

We all also had the opportunity to bring along our own "finds".
One of our flakes proved to be a waste fragment from the production of a Grand Pressigny "livre de beurre".
Our "Swiss army flint" was indeed a multi-use tool with different man-made edges and notches and we had found an arrowhead. Not one of the beautiful classic "arrow pointer" shape, but an arrowhead just the same. More about these in following posts...



Mr. Geslin holds these and other talks quite regularly, so if you see one advertised, we recommend a visit.

Apprentice to craftsman

Like most people in Touraine, we have ready access to fresh walnuts. Ours mostly end up in cakes, both sweet and savoury, though some growers have the patience to crack walnuts by hand in order to take the meats to a traditional huilerie such as Lepine, and return with their own freshly-pressed walnut oil. Because our nutcracker is still in a box somewhere, we had only a mole wrench to crack the walnuts - not a particularly successful tool! I remember as a child using a piece of pressed steel with a point that you inserted in the tiny slot in the base of the nut, and twisted, rather like opening an oyster. This tool was supposedly just the thing for walnuts, but I had no success with it!

When we saw James Gassiot's hand-turned wooden nut crackers, they had to be right - locally made (in le Grand Pressigny) from carefully selected pieces of timber with glorious patterning in the grain. Elm wood is strongly featured, along with yew and fruit woods. The casse-noix is in two parts - a bowl rather like a candle-holder for the shells, and a wooden hammer. The nut fits upright in a little cup and you smite it smartly with the hammer. If you catch it correctly, you chip pieces off both halves of the shell, and you can pull the entire nut meat out undamaged. You can crack hazel nuts in the same way. Bits of shell fly across the room, but it's much more fun than the mole wrench!

M Gassiot demonstrates the casse-noix. The book to his right is his autobiograpy.

A selection of nut crackers and mortars

M. Gassiot takes his portable lathe on its trailer to Marchés Gourmands so that he can create these utensils in front of your eyes. The pictures were taken at the Christmas Market at La Celle Guénand, where he set out his stall in one of the huge cellars of the castle.

Turning a "casse-noix"

On his retirement as compagnon charpentier in 2002, M. Gassiot wrote the story of his life's work as "Apprenti, Ouvrier, Artisan". The son of a master carpenter, he never considered another career, having, as he says, "fallen in at an early age", like Asterix in the magic potion. He started his training at the age of 14 at a wage of 6 Francs a month. A charpentier is a roofer and constructs the skeleton of large wooden buildings. The book is full of pictures of semi-clad buildings where he was involved in re-roofing (including the church in Le Grand Pressigny). There are also pictures of the more modern single-spanned buildings constructed using vast laminated beams. The earliest picture, taken in 1960, shows the proud newly-qualified 18-year-old James with his father and another master craftsman, holding a model roof, and standing in front of a lovely 2CV. Several of the later photos feature a white 2CV van! He started making the nut crackers in 2000, and his description in the book reveals the love that goes into them. Ever innovative, he is the inventor of a rolling seat on rails, made from an old garden chair and the wheels from some roller skates, for picking saffron...

This is Pauline's entry on De la Bonne Bouffe but I felt it belonged here too!

Soapwort

When travelling through rural France - or indeed rural Britain - at this time of year, you may see patches of pale lilac - pink flowers, looking rather like a phlox. The most common English name for this is Soapwort, although there are many other names - see the RHS website for a selection. In French it is called savonaire or savonnière. Its proper name is saponaria officinalis.



So why should this plant appear in Touraine Flint? The clue is in the name officinalis, which indicates that this is a medicinal herb. All parts of the plant contain saponin - soap - and it is a very effective cleaning agent. When Tim worked in forestry in the early 70s, a patch grew at the exit from the estate where he was felling trees, and he and his co-workers used a leaf or two to clean their hands before departing. The highest concentration of saponin is in the fleshy roots. At large doses soapwort is mildly poisonous, but it has been used for the treatment of skin diseases, gout, rheumatism and as a laxative and an expectorant.

Soapwort is propagated by root cuttings, taken from its underground rhizomes, or from its seeds, but it does not seem to spread in the natural environment. It is certainly a European native and some claim it was brought to the UK by monks. Whether or not this is true, soapwort is often found near habitation, and we have our own patch at La Forge.



There is another patch further along the road, several patches by the bridge, several more near the now isolated farm of Gatault, and more at the entrance to Le Grand Pressigny near the lavoir. These patches are a strong indicator that there was a building close by where someone needed soap - a home, perhaps, or in the preparation of fabrics from raw wool, hence the alternative name Fuller's herb. These buildings were made of wattle and daub, i.e. mud and sticks, and have now completely vanished, with not even a few lumps and bumps, and only the soapwort patch to show where they where. The forge will have had workers, as will the Favier mill near the bridge, and Gatault (formerly a mill) was probably a hamlet like Favier at some time. The town of Savonnières, now part of the Tours conurbation, may have got its name from the use of this herb.