About Candes

At the turn of the century, there were around 90 people living in Candes. Each house had a barn, land, and it's own bread oven. Sometimes these ovens are like an extension on the side of the house. The area where Nicholas is establishing a grove of Japanese maple trees was a free-standing bread oven. There's a similar one in the nearby village of Comiac.  Comiac would have had shops, where now there's only the cafe, which sells lunches, a few token supplies and povides postal services. This venture is sensibly subsidised by the state. The main reason is that workers in the area have somewhere for lunch. Lunch being a meal of great importance across France and heaven forbid having to take a sandwich from home to eat on the job! The communual bread oven is fired up by the men once a month. Men's business.

The add-on with the small roof is the bread oven

Nicholas had done a lot of work to make his house, built in 1780, habitable, but he doesn't stay there over winter. One of the other houses has been beautifully modernised by a Dutch couple who live mostly in Spain and come for the summer. Sadly several other houses are already in danger. The house behind Nicholas' has a steep slate roof. Each of the pieces of slate (lors) is attached with a large plug like a bolt that goes through into the roof beams. Every now and again one of the lors falls off so not a good house to walk past on a windy day. 

One of the barns

Nicholas has added the porch to his house. The building behind is Sousou's place.

Tacked onto the back of Nicholas's house is a room that he uses as a woodshed. This used to be the pigsty. Upstairs (next to my bedroom) previous owners had installed an indoor toilet. It's a little cupboard off the main room with a stone bench that has a hole in it - basically an indoor long-drop. The waste would have dropped down into the area that was the pig pen. Quite an efficient system I guess. 

Village well

These weeks Nicholas has been planting vegetables and digging beds for his potato crop, while I have been pulling out mountains of stinging nettles, and weeding around the irises, baby Japanese maple trres, hydrangeas, rose buses and peonies. For a couple of days we sat inside by the fire, rained out of the garden. We also did some walks around the neighbourhood, following tracks through the woods, often marked by mossy stone walls built who knows how long ago.