To be or not to be – your very own Hamlet

One of the best bits about this job is getting to visit lots of interesting houses, barns and ruins, many of them tucked away in hidden corners of the region. Some are wonderful, others less so but this morning I have just been to see something really unusual; a complete hamlet for sale made up of a large stone house, a six person gîte, a four person gîte and three lovely un-restored barns.

The owners, now selling up, have been living ‘the dream’  here in the Couserans region of the Ariège for the last 30 years, having restored this collection of crumbling houses and stone buildings and transformed them into a thriving gîte business. They have two horses on the couple of hectares of land surrounding the hamlet and beautiful gardens with mountain views in all directions. If only I were an estate agent, this is one I could certainly wax lyrical about.

Unfortunately I don’t have a client with the necessary million Euro budget to buy this right now but I do know from the enquiries I get that more and more people are looking for a better work-life balance and a bit of land where they can live a life more attuned to their environment. One of the most popular ways of achieving this is moving to rural France to set up a gîte business but the problem with this is that, in many parts of France, the market is now saturated and gîte owners are finding it increasingly hard to compete and earn a living. 

Interestingly however, this is not yet the case in the Ariège which has a distinct lack of good quality gîtes in an area which otherwise provides the perfect holiday destination summer and winter. Hence this gîte complex is already almost booked up for the summer and also regularly booked up for the ski season, the nearest resort of Guzet Neige being just half an hour away.

So while not everybody looking to move here is going to have this kind of budget, the dream of running a gîte business in the Ariege is probably more achievable than it would be in most parts of France. And if you are interested in being Lord of the Manor, just get in touch for more details.

Orchids and Tomatoes - in April!

For a few weeks already, Spring has well and truly sprung in our lovely corner of France and right now, it suddenly feels as if we have moved into full blown summer. I am no expert but it seems to me that the garden, woods and fields here are all at least a month ahead of where they would normally be in the middle of April.

This morning while walking the dog in the fields behind the house, I noticed that all the orchids are in full bloom which is definitely usually a May phenomenon. Mind you, I still can’t believe that I walk the dog on a daily basis through fields of orchids – in the UK it was a trek through fields of dandelions, nettles and mud so it still feels incredibly exotic to be trying to avoid stepping on orchids and fritillaries and watching lizards scuttle across the path in front of me! The Ariège region is well-known for the diversity of its plant and wildlife, much of it down to the fact that the farmer’s rarely use chemicals on their fields here and much of the land is given over to pasture and grazing rather than intensive agriculture.

The garden too is looking amazing. Of course everyone’s garden looks amazing in spring but this year everything seems to be competing to flower the longest and most abundantly. The vines – usually reticent about budding up too early - are already covered in leaves and the lemon tree is also heavy with scented flowers. Mind you, the grass is growing like crazy too as are the weeds and I expect the slugs are rubbing their tentacles together in excitement that I have already dared to plant tomato plants and sweet corn so early, ever optimistic that we have seen the last frost. At this time of year too there is the lovely juxtaposition of snow-topped mountains seen through blossom and flowers which is a magical sight.

It is one of the many things I love about this region that everything grows so well and prolifically here. I guess it is a privileged climate; a combination of the hot sunshine of the south of France and the protected micro-climate provided by the mountains but also the heavy rainstorms we sometimes get in the spring and late summer that keep the water table high. Much as I love to go on holiday to places like the Mediterranean, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere that is baked and parched. Maybe it is because I have grown up in England but, for me, living in the country is all about greenery, nature’s bounty and the miracles going on around me on a daily basis. Plus the fact that I can grow vegetables so easily – here you just plant them and they grow. The Ariège is certainly the place to live for anyone who wants to live in a perfectly balanced natural environment – and who wants to feel that they have the green fingers of Alan Titchmarsh!

Children should get out more...

...this is according to television presenter Kate Humble who is leading a campaign to get children back in touch with nature - and I couldn’t agree more. Of course, most of us realize that it is better for children to be outside in the fresh air with space to run around and nothing but their imagination and nature’s bounty to entertain them than to be sat indoors in front of a television or computer screen. But it certainly bears repeating and often as, apparently, the latter is how more and more of the children in the UK are spending their time.

Luckily rural France provides the perfect antidote to this; children here really do spend time in the countryside and they do understand and interact with nature – even if that happens to involve hooking it on the end of a fishing line! Maybe this is because France is predominantly a rural country with so much countryside and unspoiled nature available on the doorstep or maybe it is down to the attitude of us parents. In the UK, as Clive Aslet of Country Life Magazine points out, although a child’s postcode:

‘may locate them in a village, their lives will probably be suburban. Parents, worried about paedophiles and motor vehicles, won’t allow them to bicycle along country lanes. Instead, they’ll drive them everywhere by car. Shopping will be done at a supermarket that looks exactly like the ones in cities, except for being bigger and surrounded by more concrete. If the family goes on an outing, it will be to somewhere stage managed, with parking, toilets, noticeboards and disabled access.’

I think that there is a different attitude to children here in France; they are less molly-coddled, expected to be a functioning part of society and are given credit for having some innate common sense and self-preservation – in short, they have more liberté. I find it as difficult as any parent to know when is the right time to step back and let my children manage on their own and I can only speak of my own experiences, what I see happening around me but certainly many of the pupils at the primary school my daughter attends either walk or cycle to school on their own. In our small hamlet, the children come and go as they please from the age of 5 or 6; they visit their friends in neighbouring houses, take off on their bicycles on the quiet roads around the hamlet or make dens in the surrounding fields and woods. Of course, each family keeps an eye on everyone else’s children as much as they can but we generally have no real idea of what they are up to or even where they are and have to ring a bell to summon them back for meals. They are probably doing dangerous things like climbing trees or making towers of hay bales but it is through taking a few risks that children learn to be independent and develop into rounded people, better at dealing with the varied situations that life might throw at them. 

Certainly for me, one of the very best things about living in France is being able to give our children the chance to grow up in the freedom of the countryside rather than become sucked into the fake world of computer games, television stars, fashion and beauty. Of course these things will become more important to the children as they become teenagers but at least they will have had the fun of playing pooh sticks, damming streams, getting muddy and building their own worlds with branches and bracken. Hopefully they will be able to recognize birds, insects and trees and, most importantly, to understand the natural world and how it works because this is the generation that is really going to need those skills and understand how important they are if the countryside is going to exist for future generations.