“And on these spots with
many gleams I’d look’d of
chivalrous delight.”
William Wordsworth
“This must be the closest I will ever get to falling into a ‘timeless zone’ on this earth.” I said to myself as my eyes feasted on the delicate beauty around me.
I was sitting alone in a grand baronial room, overlooking the magnificent Rhone Valley, and surrounded by the splintering rays of late November sunlight.
In front of the great stone window, a great cut glass vase of flowers, entwined and still growing, interrupted the view. The pale blue sky, still empty of clutter and movement, yielded a few more hours of daylight.
Huge, worn, burgundy sofas, thread bare from years of limp bodies, interrupted the splintering rays searching across the uneven stone tiles and the embers of a dying fire, crackling and whistling its last objections.
The stillness was overwhelming, and I felt dwarfed and compliant.
In the distance human noises, enjoying haute cuisine, were the only clamour of life before a landscape of tiny patchwork fields, woven with no previous pattern in mind.
An infinite horizon searched beyond, with no challenge in sight, and a suspended tranquillity, with no sign of disturbance, hung in the air. That is what I came for.
I wandered through a short door, just next to the fireplace. It didn’t beckon me through, nor was it foreboding, but rather impersonal and nonchalant, like a teenage girl. A low stone corridor with painted panels, washed with the stains of frescos, lined the short walk. I entered a tiny, but unusually high stone room, built on a slight angle, with only a slit window for light.
Conversations whispered away from the great fireplace in the salon, still swept the walls endlessly searching for a way out. The contrast was staggering, and I felt a coldness in there so I left.
My chilled Beaujolais Nouveau danced down my throat like a gargling brook, and the flames from the new logs on the fire leapt with spat out with vigour.
The streams of sharp sunlight had moved a foot or two while I had been gone, and the flowers had entwined themselves a little more towards the hills. This was the timeless ancient place that I had searched for, and it was humbling.
I watched the sun’s rays stretch cross the flagstones and reach directly into the flames. Together they might have set the world ablaze, and it was a terrifying moment.
I wondered what connection there was over the horizon that was unknown to us and what had created such beauty.
The sky now had new strolling passengers in the late afternoon; blue and white clouds, all of whom were primped and permed like monstrous white wigs of the French court.
The stomachs downstairs had gone silent after eating, but I could hear new movement again and I knew it was only minutes before I would lose my private heaven.
Maybe I should re-join the human race…but not quicker than I had to.
It was in the thirteenth century, from 1217 to 1221, that Guichard d’Oingt erected the first castle and by the fifteenth century, Geoffroy de Balzac rebuilt it and King Charles VIII visited on 30 October 1490.
In 1566, Jean Camus, a wealthy merchant, acquired the estate in 1566 and his family kept ownership for three generations. Then in 1619, Gaspard Dugue, treasurer of France, moved to Bagnols and he made a comfortable home.
In 1820, the castle was converted into a winery and saw the construction of a gazebo, but in 20th century the castle was poorly maintained until 1987, where it was taken over by Paul Hamlyn, who restored it to its former glory, then sold it to the Von Essen hotel group.
Jean-Claude Lavorel took it over in 2012 and continues the work to make it one of the most beautiful castle hotels in the world.
They all say that, but its true in this case.
A new silence had taken hold of us as when we packed again, dragged our bags to the lobby we exchanged only the basic words.
The car radio filled the empty air with chatter, songs and the odd new bulletin we didn’t really understand. We now just wanted to head south, find some warmth and get to the coast.
As the miles disappeared at a furious rate my eyes scanned the distance ever searching for something I didn’t even know existed.
Right up ahead, thin but iridescent was unmistakable line of unrepentant yellow-they were sunflowers-unrelenting, indomitable, confident fields of millions of glowing sunflowers waiting for us.
“Let him drive as fast as he wants” I thought I so needed to reach the land of dancing bright lustrous sunflowers.
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PART 2
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Audiotape Part 1 & 2
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