Lique Ser

14 points of interest

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  One spring, five fountains

  This fountain is one of Saint-André’s five public fountains, all of which are supplied by the same spring (its water is thus the same as in the Fontaine du Griffon). Before houses were connected to mains water, there were many more fountains on this side of the quay.

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  The village of St André de Valborgne

  As you stroll along the quay above the river, you can still see the handsome bourgeois houses dating from the silk boom. If you look around, former spinning mills and industrial buildings dedicated to silk farming can still be seen in the landscape. A little lower down, opposite the 16th century château, you can listen to
  Bernadette Lafont on the Camisard saga in and after 1702. As you reach the square again, quench your thirst at the fountain and have a look inside the Romanesque church (12th century).

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  Well-supplied

  Cévenol gardens are supplied by béals (little canals), which bring water from rivers or springs to cultivated land. The latter is usually laid out in bancels (terraces). By retaining the soil, the low walls make it possible to have level plots and deeper soils. Water can seep into the ground slowly and remain there for longer.

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  Two in one

  This cobbled path going uphill is a calade. It is not only a path but also a brook, allowing rainwater to be evacuated. Caution: slippery when wet! 

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  The gardonnades

  The village benefits from the water that the Gardon brings – but it also has to put up with the river’s sporadic bad moods. Abundant rain can rapidly raise river levels. It is often in autumn that the torrent overflows its banks. The worst floods can have dramatic consequences in both material and human terms. Many can still remember the floods of September 1958 and 2002, which caused much damage.

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  Water!

  The Griffon fountain is known for its pure water, which will quench any walker’s thirst. In the old days, the whole neighbourhood used it not only for drinking but also for cooking, washing, washing clothes, watering plants, etc. The fountain was not only a supply point but also an important meeting-point in village life.

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  Fauna

  Fish and other animals...

  On the river banks, a pretty white, grey and black bird paces up and down looking for insects, bopping its long tail up and down: the white wagtail. The more colourful grey wagtail is often seen alongside it. The white-throated dipper resembles a blackbird with a big white stain on its breast. It often disappears underwater to hunt insect larvae. Trout, which like the same prey, also live in the Gardon, where they keep anglers happy.

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  The age of silk

  From the 19th century onwards, the silk industry developed in the Cévennes: tanneries gave way to spinning mills. The mills used water not only to treat the silkworm cocoons (which were boiled to prepare the silk) but also for the steam-driven spinning machines. In the second half of the 19th century, diseases strongly reduced silk production, which was also subject to competition from foreign silks and then from artificial silk. The silk industry went under in 1965.

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  The tanners’ district

  La Calquière district gets its name from that of the ditches in which the tanners soaked their animal skins with limestone, which is called cauç or calç in Occitan. All along the Gardon there were tanneries because its acidic water was good for rinsing the skins, which was indispensable for obtaining high quality products.

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  Traces of giants?

  “Giant’s cauldrons” have formed in the rock at the base of the waterfall. These regular, rounded cavities are only created in rapidly flowing waters. They are caused by the repeated friction of stones caught in a depression and moved by swirling currents.

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  The Château de Nogaret

  Built in the 11th century, the Château de Nogaret stood on the only road linking Saint-André de Valborgne with Le Pompidou. It is believed to have been constructed to serve as a stronghold and to defend the Vallée Borgne. It was set alight in 1628 during the war between the Duke of Rohan and Louis XIII, and again in 1704 by the Camisards, before being rebuilt in the 18th century. This private property still belongs to the Manoel de Nogaret family.
  “This small château is one of the finest examples of the fortified manor houses built towards the end of the Middle Ages by minor local lords wanting to free themselves, at least symbolically, from domination by their feudal overlords.” (Isabelle Darnas - Les châteaux médiévaux en Cévennes).

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  The sweet chestnut : a food tree

  You are in a grafted chestnut orchard, which means that the trees were maintained and their nuts harvested by locals to be eaten in the family. The enormous trees around you are about 300 years old.  
  The chestnuts were dried in a clède, a small building on two levels that was located either close to the dwellings or right inside the forest. The clède would have been in use for an entire month in autumn to ensure that the whole, wood-dried chestnuts could be preserved for a year.
  The chestnut tree was so vital in local subsistence farming that it was also called l'arbre à pain (the bread tree); it was also used to make beams, barrels, baskets, trunk-beehives and more, feed livestock and provide their bedding.

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  Lique Ser

  Lique Ser path goes up to the famous Corniche des Cévennes, a ridge between the two departments of Gard and Lozère. This road, which is busy these days in summer because of its superb views, has not always been a holiday address.
  In the days of Louis XIII and XIV, this was the route of the dragonnades and the repression of Protestantism by the King’s army after the Revocation of the Edict (the billeting of deliberately ill-disciplined soldiers in Protestant households) of Nantes. This ridge gave the soldiers, known as the King’s dragoons, strategic viewpoints. The road was abandoned from the 19th century onwards. In 1930, after lengthy renovations, it was opened to traffic again, becoming a major tourist route

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  A grapevine ravine in schist country

  Schist (slate) is omnipresent all around you. Dark, with silvery reflections and a reddish oxidation due to naturally occurring iron, schist is the local building material par excellence. It is the perfect material for covering roofs. It can be turned into solid cobblestoned tracks called calades, where the stones are arranged tightly against each other on-edge. The dry-stone walls that you can see almost everywhere are also built from schist. These walls have largely withstood the test of time, though less so over the past decades because of a lack of maintenance. In the old days, they were regularly repaired, since they retained the terraced cropland for subsistence crops, including the indispensable sweet chestnut trees and, here, grapevines.