Le Pays du Dropt – peinture

Another of my neighbours, here in ‘Le Pays du Dropt.’ The coppiced willows, ‘vieux têtards’, follow the old chemin communal which used to run from Castillonès to Villéreal. Here is a place where you can feel the history in landscape; It hasn’t yet been cut up into seven kilometre square treeless, hedgeless fields. The generations of hands that worked the land created ‘le bocage’, a delicate tapestry of little fields & brimming hedges. And the land worked them too, so that even their houses took on a feel of the land. I know it all looks abit ninteenth century-ish, but in my village, there are more old houses than new build. And that’s not counting all the others that have returned into the earth, literally just sunk back into the ground.