Plains and planes of Carcassonne

The plains and planes of Carcassonne

“The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.” This passage from “Saki”, the Edwardian writer of sardonic, sometimes cruel, but always witty, short stories, kept popping into my head during a short visit to the area North-East of Carcassonne in South-West France.

The vast flat plain lying between the city and the ridges of the Montaigne Noire is given over to one crop- vines, field after field- stretching in every direction. Who on earth drinks all the resulting wine?

“On earth” proves to be an apt phrase. One wine writer points out that, by the 1980s, the wider Languedoc region (of which the area I visited forms part) “produced 10 per cent of the planet’s wine”. I read further that the traditional role of the region was to supply very cheap plonk for the daily needs of the Northern French (eg those carafes served for no extra charge at lunchtime in truckers’ cafes…).

Cheap plonk is still produced in many thousands of litres; but the local area (now basking in its own Minervois Appellation) also makes increasingly sophisticated (and more expensive) wines.

Even so, there is still something alarming, something not quite believable, about the incessant vines.

Another item that comes in excess, at least during the French summer holidays, is the tourist siege of the ancient Cite of Carcassonne. The huge walls and towers of this city-fortress are truly an impressive sight – from a distance (one of the best views is from the nearby autoroute).

But…when I first visited the place many years ago, I was convinced that it was a Disnified fake. The perfect state of the fortifications, the narrow streets housing olde worlde shops selling tourist tat and takeaways – it didn’t add up to authenticity.

I later learned that the Cite had, over the centuries, fallen into ruin, as what is now the modern town of Carcassonne had developed to the West. But the Cite was, in a massive programme of works, massively restored in the c19. So it is a hybrid – not a fake, but certainly not all original. (Perhaps it is an instantiation of that old philosophical conundrum,  The Ship of Theseus – over the years, gradually, plank by plank, mast by mast, the ship is repaired and rebuilt, until one day there is nothing left of the original ship, but it still has the same design and appearance. The question is, is the ship still the same ship?)

However, I immediately recognised the ghastly shops again, just inside the main entrance.

At least on the previous visit I had moved freely through the streets. This time, the crowds were such that moving through Security at Stansted Airport in high summer seemed like a 100 metre sprint. How a barely moving shuffle is compatible with appreciation of even reconstructed architecture is beyond comprehension. Equally depressing are the wider spaces given over to mass catering, where visitors sit like refugees at row after row of very long tables.

The Cite is best appreciated from without, as most besiegers in the past have found. It has been surrendered, but never stormed – until the tourists came.

Carcassonne airport provides a different experience. It is one of those tiny French airports that are little more than a shed and a runway. It is a one horse place (the horse being Ryanair). On a busy day it has all of 5 arrivals and 5 departures, evenly spaced.

You can have the strange experience of turning up at security – even when your plane is fully booked – and finding that the security people are waiting for you, being their only customer at that moment, rather than the other way round.

There is no duty free mall – just a small café and some vending machines in a down at heel departure lounge and a 200 metre walk, rain or shine, to the plane (contrast the 100 metre compulsory bus ride at other airports).

You board your plane at what is , in railway terms, a sleepy wayside halt and get flown to – the summertime horrors of Stansted. There, the passport control hangar is like a blocked drain. A milling crowd, ever increasing as new passengers arrive, is chaotically unordered. Get through that, you gradually swirl through snaking lines to Border Control – where the machines seem to be rejecting, or at least not accepting, a lot of people’s E passports, prompting many to skip from booth to booth in the hope of finding a tolerant machine, but delaying those yet to approach.

At least, when you get through all this, you find that your bags have already arrived on the carousel.

August 2017