Thursday May the Eighth was a bank holiday in France which we hadn’t counted upon when we went there a couple of weeks ago so we were faced with a day in which we couldn’t meet with the various builders etc so we had an unexpected free day.

The decision was quickly made to visit some of the nearby villages, all in the name of research for our tourist information for the chambre d’hote.
The truth is of course that Sile and I love French villages and are prepared to visit them at any excuse at all.
La Couvertoirade was on our hit list since my daughters had given me a book called The Prettiest Villages in France, and this one was thought La Plus Belle Village de Languedoc.
It was built as a Knights Templar fortified village in 1450 and gradually fell into decline, it was abandonned, like a lot of other isolated Languedoc villages, in the 1880’s so remains unspoiled.
It has now been semi colonised by craft workers, weavers, glass blowers, wooden toy makers and others.

I pinched this shot from the internet.
The rest are mine.

It still has its original ramparts intact around which you can promenade

and some of the streets and lanes still look much as they did in the fifteenth century.

Our next village was intended to be St Guillhem de Desert but it was full, or at least the car park was,(it was a bank holiday) so we had to pass on.

Sile remembered seeing a sign for a village, originally a Royal Manufacturing Village of textiles near Clermont l’Herault so, despite it not being mentioned in any of the guides, we decided to try it out.

This village, called Villeneuvette, was a model village built as a textile factory by Louis XVI Le Roi Soleille in 1670.

This turned out to be a little gem, very few tourists (they were all up in St Guilhem) and beautifully preserved with an intact Place complete with mossy fountain and some excellent craft shops and restaurants.

Sile , A La Claire Fontaine

A gateway in Villeneuvette

We also discovered, by falling on it, a village called St Jean de Fos which specialises in outdoor and garden pottery and has several working potters producing the sort of pots which Ali Baba’s forty thieves could have comfortably squatted.
We will be back.