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the organic evolution of a Bearnais farm. First, somebody builds a fine stone farmhouse, usually on the shoulder of a hill where he will have a good view of his cows, and plants
a handsome pair of palm trees outside the front door. Then he builds a fine stone barn, usually at right angles, and then a second barn a bit later, usually of a different size and in different
materials. Then the next generation inherit the place, ambitions of grandeur trickle away, and they chuck up the add-ons, the pig sties and the poultry house, with maybe another barn, or a smaller
house for the younger brother, then perhaps a nice concrete all-purpose building, and a tin-roofed lean-to and wood store. After the first hundred years, the whole complex starts to surrender to
gravity, rain, wind and the occasional earthquake, all of which encourage the walls to crumble downhill a few centimetres more each year. The result is chaotic, dilapidated, picturesque and nothing
like the super-neat farms of Normandy, with their matching stable blocks and semicircular gravel drives.
    As you keep walking downhill, the next thing you pass is the fish pond and/or reservoir, created by damming a streamin a hollow of the hillside. There is a small pine wood
behind it on one side, and the rest of the land around it is marshy and covered with tufts of that spiky grass that’s half a reed and always grows where there is underground water. The stream
itself trickles out of a pipe at the foot of the dam, but picks up momentum from ditches feeding into it at the bottom of the valley, and rushes happily away to the south, overhung with alders. It
will eventually hit the bottom of the big valley and run into the big river, the Gave d’Oloron.
    Then the road climbs again, up the next hill, which belongs to the church and the spirit. The church looks like not much more than a pile of rocks, a building with vastly thick walls but so tiny
that it is dwarfed by the slabs of porphyry marking the family graves in the minute churchyard. It too stands on the hilltop. I paced out the walls to measure them, allowing for the massive stone
buttress on the downhill side. Twenty-five metres long, with an immaculate tiled roof.
    The interior is beautifully plain, white walls rising to a dome over the altar, which is an oak chest carved with Maltese crosses. The pine pews are recent. Against the back wall, in the shadow
of the wooden balcony, stands a line of prie-dieu chairs, every one different, carved in country style from different woods. The copper cover of the font is highly polished, and by the door a bowl
from my neighbour the potter holds the holy water.
    Across the road from the church is a very old and largely dead oak tree, its gnarled roots rising clear of the tarmac. The oak was a sacred tree to the Basques, and to the Celts, and the fact
that nobody has tidied up this hulk and turned it into firewood suggests that the tradition has lingered. A half-rotten notice board, with nothing on it, is nailed to the trunk.
    I walked down through the village then turned up the hill to Orion, the next village, on the road that runs along a ridge of hills. We are on the pilgrim route to Compostela, andjust outside Orion is a medieval hostel for the faithful who’ve set out to walk over the Pyrenees to the shrine of St James in Compostela, in Spain.
    As I passed through a wood I heard birds calling. The notes were rounded and expressive, but much deeper than the call of the doves. I didn’t recognize the sound and wondered what silly
species would advertise itself to predators so noisily. Then a line of birds flew low overhead, about fifty of them, a long ribbon of silhouettes, wing tip to wing tip, rippling across the clear
blue sky above the bare tree tops and calling to each other as they went. The cranes were flying south for the winter.
    Not all the wildlife is so majestic, or so far off. Something brown scuttled into the bamboo thicket by the front gate yesterday.