Périgord life. Je t’adore, 24

Large round hay bales scattered across the fields of Loubejac

WHEN I moved to a small house in sight of the church tower at Loubejac in the south of the Dordogne, one of the first people I met was Roger Clifford-Banks.

He first arrived in the Périgord region in 1972, and over the years has lived on and off in Loubejac with his wife and three children.

In the near 40 years he has spent in the area Roger has become good friends with local farming families and seen their techniques and lives change – something he wrote about in his month-by-month blog Perigordlife.blogspot.com.

As interest grew in his website he was asked if he could edit his articles into a book, and so Roger went on to produce Périgord life. Je t’adore, 24.

Here are the opening couple of pages from the chapter covering June.

So here we are in June; the month that begins as Spring and ends as Summer. June is one of my favourite months (along with September), when days can be beautifully warm and subsequent evenings pleasant enough for late night alfresco wining and dining.

The pool is now open, and shorts are official uniform to be worn until September. Barbeques are dusted off and scrubbed down, and at the supermarket checkouts sacks of charcoal are as common as the Dutchmen who purchase them by the dozens.

This is the time of year when the whole concept of outdoor living becomes reality. Most well appointed homes in this part of France have an outdoor room called an auvent.

This is a roof covered terrace room, usually attached to the house on one side with the other three sides open; the whole structure being supported by stout wooden or stone pillars resting on low surrounding walls.

The idea is in the evenings one is protected from sudden rain storms (usually essential). This is where we will now breakfast, lunch and dine for the next three months.

Anyone without an auvent (the occasional mad dog or Englishman) would be seriously disadvantaged, it becomes the most important room of the house.

My thanks to Tarmidi Madai of Moroni in the Comoros Islands, and Peter Diederichs of Prt Elizabeth, S Africa amongst others.

In your emails you ask roughly the same question about my use of the word commune. No I don’t live on a commune in the old 1960s sense, I use the word as in the French meaning of ‘community’ or village.

Our cottage is a privately owned property in a sparsely populated farming village of about 250 residents.

We are not members of some new-age, self-sufficiency, hippy colony; I trust that puts your mind at rest.

Grass is as valuable to a dairy farmer as diamonds are to a jeweller, and differing methods for its careful preservation seem to come and go annually. Claude, whose hay fields are directly around the cottage, cuts grass each year for both hay and silage.

Last year he tried a new method which involved tightly wrapping round bales of freshly cut grass in a type of heavy white cling-film plastic, creating what amounted to individual packages of silage.

This year he has used a similar method but without the bales ending up as individual packages; the green bales this year were fed one-by-one into a machine that wrapped them continuously into one long tube that now lies like a giant white worm at the edge of his largest field.

Not particularly attractive, but it seems to work.

Luckily I am of such great age that I can still remember the beauty of English haystacks. As a boy in my native Surrey there were annual competitions for the best made haystacks, and these beautiful structures were, from Summer through to the following Spring, an essential part of the landscape.

Bales were neatly and tightly stacked, the roofs were expertly thatched, and the finished stacks topped with intricate hay sculptures of pheasants, peacocks, or whatever creature the individual farmer fancied.

Situated in the fields where the hay had been cut, these stacks always looked in harmony with their surroundings and were regular attractions as one passed through the countryside.

I wonder if this type of haystack ever existed here in Périgord?