Sketches
Ruins
It isn't unusual to find unidentified ruins, hidden in a fold of the land in the Pyrenees. Or sometimes they stand out, perched on an outcrop or a ridge.
A couple of years ago, we were exploring one of the river valleys around Rennes-les-Bains and came across a customs post. Strange, I thought, what could that be for?
I did a little research and found it was a revenue station for the control of salt smuggling.
The ruins in this picture might first have tumbled in the time of the Cathars. The oldest stonework at the base of the walls is little more than muscular foundations to the variety of techniques superimposed upon it – dry-stone walling, rubble walling, lime mortar, modern render. And, of course, the whole crumbling edifice bound together with clinging woody stems of ivy.
Perhaps this is the kind of tumbledown débris the poet Charles Baudelaire imagined as an inadequate, unquiet sepulchre for his corps vanté …
