Summer in Provence

We are in Provence to visit friends and wander slowly through the heat haze of summer, travelling from the elegant former papal city of Avignon to the Mediterranean and up into the Rhône-Alpes.

The shady streets and shuttered houses of Sablet wind in a spiral around the 12th-century church of St Nazaire. The old farmhouse where our friends Lincoln and Anne lived together is outside the stone ramparts of this Provencal hilltop village with views across the vineyards to the jagged range of the Dentelles de Montmirail. We are here to visit Anne, Lincoln’s wife, a year after Lincoln’s untimely death from cancer. Talking late into the warm night of his last days on earth. Walking up into the hills to the place where his ashes are scattered. A tenderly placed sitting rock, a tree with a Buddhist prayer flag, a tranquil perspective of the Dentelles as a bird might see them on a blue-sky summer’s day.

Anne continues to explore her interest in natural dyes and textiles. Her atelier (studio) is light-filled and intriguing with its vats of indigo and lengths of dyed blue cloth. We spend a long, languid morning at St-Cecile market, buying food for lunch and meeting Anne’s friends who welcome us to their ritual gathering on the terrace of their favoured cafe. We converse with the worldly Aldo who journeyed to Australia once and stayed only for two days. All he wanted was to see the Sydney Opera House. In his eyes, it is the most beautiful, the most luminous building in the world. 

White herons riding bareback on white ponies, pale villages, blue shutters and a sea of sunflowers. Vineyards, olive groves and lavender fields. We make our way to Arles for its treed plazas, dazzling light and still palpable presence of Vincent van Gogh. The glint off the river, the cafe terrace, the sunflowers, the starry night sky; all as he painted them and all still brilliant. One of the most serene paintings on exhibition at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh is Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Maries, painted when van Gogh spent time in this nearby fishing village in 1888.

We travel to Sts Maries de la Mer ourselves, to see the beach as van Gogh saw it and search for pink flamingos in the wetlands of the Camargue. We walk along the shore and see wild, white, Camargue horses – an ancient and tough breed – but no flamingoes. The church of the Saintes Maries de la Mar, built between the 9th and 12th-century, houses a statue of St Sarah in its crypt. It is a place of pilgrimage for Romani people who gather here annually to celebrate their culture and pay homage to St Sarah (Sara-la-Kali), their patron saint. Bob Dylan wrote the song One More Cup of Coffee when he was in Sts Maries de la Mer in 1975 for the Romani festival. Your pleasure knows no limits, your voice is like a meadowlark, but your heart is like an ocean, mysterious and dark.

In Avignon we drink rosé in a cool, treed plaza and, once it is dark, watch a mesmerising illuminated history of the Palais des Papes projected onto the stone walls of the palace courtyard. The next day we meet our French walking friends, Jean and Marie-José, and travel with them to Jean’s home in Saint-Thomé, a medieval village perched on a rocky peak in the Ardèche. At night, in summer, the château, church and ramparts are lit up; the view from Jean’s terrace across to the village is magical.

Jean drives us up into the wild dark hills of the Ardèche where the goat herders and the honey gatherers live to buy fresh chevre from an artisan cheesemaker. In the intense heat of a high summer’s afternoon we walk with Jean, Marie-José and their friends Andre and Maguy, to Rochemaure, the black mountain, with its château in ruins but its charming village intact. The next day we walk again, climbing up to the Dent de Rez for a picnic, the hot air fragrant with wild lavender, thyme and juniper, the views across the green valley to Mont Ventoux superb. We stop on the way back at a Dolmen site to admire the megalithic tomb with its great flat limestone cap balancing on vertical stone uprights. And we divert to a cave à vin (cellar door), to taste some excellent rosé and medal-winning Shiraz, both selling for a song by Australian standards.

A weekend at Andre & Maguy’s mountain chalet at Méribel in the French Alps. A visit to the Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce du Plateau d’Assy, a modernist church facing Mont Blanc in the Haute-Savoie. Consecrated in 1950 its interior is adorned with paintings, sculptures, mosaics and tapestries commissioned from some of the most renowned artists of the twentieth century including Bonnard, Léger, Matisse, Braque and Chagall. Its stained glass windows by Georges Rouault are works of remarkable beauty and sorrow.

We visit the Chauvet Cave with its stunning 30,000-year-old figurative paintings of bison, bears, horses, lions, panthers and owls. High up on a limestone cliff in the Gorges de l’Ardèche it was only discovered in 1994. A ‘cave of forgotten dreams’, it is now a World Heritage site and considered one of the most significant prehistoric art sites on the planet.

Eating delicious meals provided by the garden, the orchard and neighbour Jean-Marc, a keen hunter. Every meal a feast; each small exquisite dish a celebration of terroir and culture. Jean’s work was growing wine (as they say in the Ardeche) and as well as tasting Cote du Rhone wines from his cellar, we also indulge in the liqueurs he makes from wild ingredients, each one more beguiling than the last. 

Lulled by the sounds of summer in Provence; the clattering songs of cicadas, the mistral rustling in the leaves when it blows in from the north, the chatter of children as they splash in the swimming pools of rented gites. Quietly celebrating the embrace of friends whose souls are rooted in the centuries-old traditions and terroir of the Ardèche and whose hearts and minds are open to the world.