Eyragues …

A short drive south of Avignon is the village of Eyragues, where I spent a few days at a house belonging to a friend of a friend. A former farmhouse with attached barn it had been partly converted by a painter before the current owner took it on, opening up the garden, finishing the conversion and adding a pool.

It’s a large house, as you might expect, with a lot of bedrooms and even more beds, and there is potential to increase that, with a detached barn as well as an unfinished former barn in the main house building.

I would have enjoyed my stay there had I been well, but I was struck down with some sort of cold/sore throat/flu thing as I arrived and it dragged on and on. I was on my own a great deal of the time, a situation I would normally have been comfortable with but found it harder than expected.

There isn’t much to see in the town itself, the Poets’ Park celebrating the writers who, in 1854, decided to restore the language and literature of Provence and codify the local language and grammar. An interesting church (Saint-Maxime) with a metal tricolour pennant on the steeple, seemingly always in use for weddings, and a small square with a Friday market. Some nice narrow streetscapes, such as rue de Ninette, the partial remains of a mill, rebuilt in 1885 after a fire, and lots of irrigation channels.

There were a lot of channels and there had been many mills in the district, and I was told that the flow in the channels is such that they can do without rain for longer periods that other districts; the area is green and lush, even at the end of summer.

There’s le Domaine de la girafe (house of the giraffe) which refers to a caravan carrying a giraffe, a present from the Egyptian Pacha, Mohamed Ali to Charles X of France, stopped in Eyragues in June 1827, but no-one seems to know much about it, or whether the giraffe made it to Paris. There’s a few bits and pieces of medieval walls remaining, (not as many as the official guide would have you believe, unless cunningly disguised as a petrol station and supermarket.) And what there is, is old; there was a settlement here in pre-Roman times.

And cars, lots of cars. The few bike riders I saw were riding better quality machines, wearing lycra and helmets in some cases and flouro vests in others. no older bikes and only a couple of less mainstream types.

While I was there the house was being prepared for a photographer to take pictures, as the house is to be sold. That was quite enjoyable, the garden was looking good and the house, when opened up, is a very nice place.