A Cévennes panorama – la croix de gattigues

This hiking trail starts from a spot in Saint-Sebastien d’Aigrefeuille about 9 km from Alès in the lower Cévennes. The starting location is not in the centre of the village, but on a side road near the Amous river at the bottom edge of the Carnoulès lead mine. We start with a pretty stroll upstream along the Amous river, which is flowing with clean water in February. The Amous river, downstream from the starting point flows through the famous Anduze Bamboo park (La Bambouseraie) in Générargues. The Amous then spills into the Gardon river about 2 km from Anduze. We’ll see later why this is of interest…

The trail continues along the river for a while before rising up to pass through a couple typical Cévennes mountain hamlets. After leaving the hamlets behind the trail moves steadily uphill to the Moncalm ridge. This ridge starts near Alès and extends more or less continuously northeast for around 30 km towards the central Cévennes region. If you turn left upon reaching the ridge line you can walk the ridge trail all the way to the Jalcrest pass (on the main highway from Alès to Florac). On the way you would look down on the landscapes of the Galeizon valley, the Mialet Gardon and the Vallée Française. But we turn right at this point to walk southeast along the ridge towards Alès. After enjoying good views of Mount Aigoual on the way up, this ridge path opens up spectacular views of Mount Lozère to the north. No difficulty here except for a spot where you have to scramble down a rocky path with steep drop offs to the left. All the empty space to the left in this section makes it hard for anyone afraid of heights.

Eventually we leave the ridge line and loop to the right along fire warden and local access routes down to the pretty hilltop village of Carnoulès.

source and reservoir in l'Agrunalet — source and reservoir in l’Agrunalet

looking north from the ridge to (snowy) Mount Lozere

the river Amous upstream from la Fabregue

After Carnoulès things become rather more sombre. The landscape is bare, with much evidence of excavation and earth moving, little undergrowth and many tall pines. This is an abandoned lead mine, operated in the last quarter of the 17th century and then again from the 1830s through the ups and downs of wartime, price slumps and ownership changes until about 1963. Here there are remains of both open pit and underground shaft mining. Anyone who has read about lead and silver mines knows that tailings contain arsenic and several heavy metals (zinc, cadmium etc), not to mention lead. Here the tailings were stored in drainage bassins in the Reigous valley behind earthen dams. At one point, this was even the biggest lead mine in France. Inevitably after the miners are gone and forgotten, the famous autumn Cévennes rainstorms took over. For example, in 1976 after substantial rains, the dams overflowed and about 300 000 t of toxic mud flowed down the Reigous valley towards its junction with the Amous river. The result is that about 4 km of the Reigous valley is polluted and the Amous river, from the Reigous inflow point is also heavily polluted. Nobody beyond the confines of this valley seems to care if the local residents are poisoned, or if properties have no resale value. A much noted French investigative television report signaled these problems finally in 2016 and even then it seems like they were a surprise to some. Various monitoring actions and studies of toxicity are in place but I could not see any evidence of a clean-up in progress.

As an aside, it is well known that pines thrive in acid soils, and it is also well documented that the soils around this mine are extremely acid. Maybe nature is adapting to this desolate area with unsuspected resourcefulness.

In February 2014, on the first pass around this circuit, I noted the strange landscape, but didn’t take any pictures. In February 2017, I returned with our club to walk the loop again. This time I took a few pictures below. The links at the bottom provide more data about the mine.

water run-off : abandonned mine in Carnoulès

This hike is documented in the topoguide “Les Cévennes” published in 2005 by Chamina (see circuit no 2 on page 43).

Links :

Hiking in south central France

This site is about walking, mostly in south central France, specifically the Cévennes “mountain” range, the Grands Causses area with it’s plateaus and canyons, the departments of Gard with the garrigue landscapes, the Vaucluse, the Herault, sometimes the Ardèche, the Avéyron and the Drôme. There are descriptions of interesting walks, but sometimes also the non-interesting ones. There are occasional articles about the hardware and software you might use while hiking and in particular handheld GPS devices and smartphones. There are also references to cartography both in the field and on the computer screen back home. The progress in the area of web mapping in the past several years, with the arrival of services like Google Maps, Nokia Here (now “Here we go”) and the OSM Open source map service, has been spectacular.

However, hiking in this region is more than just walking with eyes focused forward or concentration on the GPS screen. It’s also about observing and understanding the landscapes, villages, farms, ancient ruins and various geological curiosities. Often the subject of interest is not the “what”, but the “why”. Why did people settle here hundreds of years ago? Why did the ancient trade routes pass this spot?

In this region, traces of human activity are everywhere – in the still occupied villages and farms, but also in the undergrowth, on the riverbanks and and on the abandoned hillsides. This site aims to explore these subjects, traveling on foot, at about 3.5 km per hour.

This site is also for people who like maps. There are maps in nearly every article, often with interactive features. Try them out.

For every walk mentioned in an article, the site provides a downloadable gpx file suitable for use on a handheld gps device. The site provides additional access to a database of some 700 circuits also complete with downloadable gpx. It is worth noting however, that a gpx track is a perishable commodity. Over time waymakings change, land owners block walking routes, obstacles appear. For this reason, when available, dates of the most recent passage on the circuits are also provided. Use with care.

Everywhere you go on these hiking routes you are likely to see a field cross. They can be in iron, stone, or wood and can be simple or ornate. These field crosses are supposed to have protected travellers from bandits – as supposedly no bandit would dare attack near a symbol of the all powerful religion.

So the french word “croix” translates to cross and holds the connotation of the cross as a religious symbol. However, in the context of this site, cross means crossroad or intersection. “La Croix de Gattigues” refers to a crossroad in a hamlet in the Gard department at which, no surprise, there is also a fine an iron cross.

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