Hautefort

I went briefly to Hautefort yesterday afternoon.  Hautefort is the beautiful little village with an imposing château where I usually buy the “Radio Times”. 

 

The Château de Hautefort  was originally a 12^th century fortress belonging to Bertran de Born and was besieged by Richard the Lionheart and the French king in Bertran’s time. Richard’s older brother, Henry, had rebelled against their father, Henry II, and Bertran stood accused of egging him on.  Bertran was a noted poet and warrior, writing a lot of his poetry about how splendid it was to go to battle and chop people up.      

The present château is imposing and must, over the years, have commandeered the lion’s share of available resources.  Eugene le Roy, a local labourer’s son born in 1836, wrote his novel Jacqou le Croquant about the desperate poverty of the local peasantry compared to the plenty of château owners. 

 In 1929 the château came into the hands of the Baron and Baronne de Bastard (sic) who spent all their lives in restoration work.  In 1968 one of their daughter’s guests (a friend of the little Bastards) was said to have dropped a lighted cigarette whilst walking round the château, which managed to burn everything burnable in a blaze seen across the Dordogne.   The widowed Baronne set to work and restored the château once again and did a good job.  Hautefort  Château is a beautiful building, bullying the landscape for miles around.  It’s especially imposing floodlit at night.  The Bastards gave their name to local streets – even the local football pitch is called Stade de Bastard.  Whether it’s worth devoting the whole of one’s life to a castle, I don’t know.     

 

            
Other news is that Dolly has turned killer.  She flushed a small sparrow like bird, probably a dunnock, out of our laurel bush and chased it down the drive.  It ran like billy-o, but in vain, she pounced on it at the bottom of the drive and now the poor bird is no more.  There were a number of feathers in the laurel bush, and I think it may have been recovering from a prior cat assault and could not fly.  Although the attack was fatal it wasn’t particularly vicious - there was no tearing, rending or crunching on Dolly’s part.  So the small corpse is lying mostly intact near the garage, waiting for one of us to bury it or for another animal to dispose of it.  Dolly has been chastised but whether she took any of it in, I don’t know.   Mike is taking it more seriously than I am.  I was about to give Dolly some scraps from my dinner last night when he said, “Don’t do that – it’s a licence to kill”.   Bertran de Born would have liked it.